Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  On Tuesday you will come with the fourteen horses and four coloured wheels, and enter the monastery bravely. Your fear is childish and obvious. In your jaunty clothes you are afraid. I draw you aside to the corner and put my hands on your body, to assure myself that you are a woman, and to recollect what you mean.

  As I write this I realize that Tuesday has become solid, a girl’s body in coloured silk with stiffened nipples, fear, and the attitudes of pathos. The rules forbid us to enter the white bed and carry this exploration to its conclusion—the unimaginable outposts of feeling when you are a cool-bodied fish in the sheets, palpitating in the oblique current, gathered like fucus, slippery, thewed, thewed as the leopard. My little ape! You and your tribe are like coloured children, so transparent in feeling. I turn towards the solid Tuesday of hips and flesh, smooth buttocks and pectorals, with a momentum that is the eternal theme for us all here. The week glows towards Tuesday, the storms plunder the outposts, flocks of wild birds empty themselves over the lamps: secure in the lighthouse I wait for the Tibetan fiat to sound. Vasec waits with me, he does not know for what, and the intangible Dancer. The rest have gone. All the time, at night, lying in our beds, we can hear the dim roar of the looms, the factory where the empty calendar is woven and painted with heraldic beasts. The beating heart underneath us, weaving its Sundays and Mondays, the bobbins dithering in a frenzy of activity. The night.

  On Tuesday there will be a jewelled hush, an audit. The walks will be dressed in snow, the bushes incandescent with birds. Everything fallen in a divine abyss of lull, poem, zodiac, frost, butter. Perhaps today is the day, I do not know. I find it difficult to tell until I hear the motor, the fourteen horses crushing the jewels, and the doors of God opening.

  Vasec says you must bring the canary: he will not believe until he sees it with his own eyes. He is an experienced countryman, he says. So how can he believe that the cage was created round it by God? It is slightly redundant: if God gave it wings, then why the cage which is too small for it to use them? You will have to answer this when you come. We are very much at rest on the point, however, because I am teaching everyone how to experience phenomena. In this sector of experience there is only the creative activity. We are nothing ourselves: we do not let our imaginations even imagine that we have a part in the cosmic dance. It happens like cinema. Kiss the children for me, and see that they say their prayers—it is ridiculous, ridiculous! Today I said to the old man: “I am a free man, thinking free thoughts, why must I suffer?” Inevitably he did not understand. But he went away and searched his whole library to find a name for my suffering. He is a good soul, but frugal—terribly frugal and meagre. My opulence makes him fear me. He looks in my eyes and trembles—so deep they are, so sad and assured, set deep in my glum sockets. At times the symphony that runs through my arteries like a river reaches him, touches him, scalds like a live wire. He sits there like a domestic rabbit in his white apron, surrounded by pencils and paper, shaken with an anonymous agony for me, for my passion and crucifixion which he begins dimly to understand. When he sees you the tears come into his eyes, and he locks himself in the library, trying to find a way out of it all. Why, when you are so young, so debonair, so much one with your slim silk clothes, the caryatid, the green girl? For my part I am happy, I touch your clothes and hair: I break little morsels of desire from you and share them with Vasec and the Dancer. It is a charity which costs so little when I am so rich in you, so Arabian with bullion.

  Did you know? Hamlet is dead, the little one, the black cardinal. I must break the news gently. Vasec came to me in the night crying like a bull because the little one was his pet. Vasec was disfigured by a divine love, and when I lit the candles his nostrils were carved in ink. His hands dredged up the sheets with weeping. It was a personal pain under the heart: the loose dewlap quivering like a jelly under his tears. He was like Lesbia with the dead sparrow. The old man thought it was appendicitis for a long time, until he entered, and experienced the ghost. In the starched bed the little man was supine, his little fingers yellow and little, clenched like the claws of a dead bird. The lines on his face meant nothing. He had died in the future—how far ahead of us all we could not tell. Even the physicist could not tell. It was a moment of great nicety—because we could not bury him until he joined us in the present. Ophelia was not present by request of the management, and there were few flowers. Everyone was puzzled. However, we decided to keep to the form, even if he was without substance for another fifty years or so. It was a wonderful night.

  We buried him in his own country, following down the long lines of cypresses, the lions regardant, the double-axe, and the eagles. The priests were plangent with victory, and their black soutanes glowed like insects in the candles. A wild cold night, with a full moon hanging aloft, as clear as a bugle-call. The earth was mystical all over Europe at our ceremony, opening the mother to receive her Hamlet, the western dead. Forgive us our sins. The little men with bony skulls and knuckles made of bark descanted our mimic with real fervour. The beards rose and fell. Decorum was emptied in our spirits like a salve, while the sea spoke on our left, the headlands were torrential with the moaning of the wild olive, the juniper, the walnut, the cedar of Lebanon. I knew in those moments the worth of everything, fell like a carving to the clandestine cobbles, bowed, broke, emptied in all utterance to the sea by wild music, the cataleptic jargon of tongues, the pneumatic gifts. My soul was full of broken weals and stars of the third magnitude. I kissed Vasec’s lips, slippery under their hairs, because I am Yorick for ever and we are brothers in Hamlet, and the sea drives on whatever we do, to Crete. Understand me, wherever you are, lying in whatever null bed, hearing the wind climb in the trees and the cranes negotiate Sicily. I am no longer fish nor fruit, vegetable, mineral, oracle. Weep for Lycidas, dead ere his prime.

  The problem is serious. For in spite of the ceremony, Hamlet is in the room, dead, but waiting for us to catch up with him. What everyone wonders is: will he stay fresh? We touch his lips, draw them away from the jawbone like a dog. They are stiff relics—a bunch of dusty grapes left over from a forgotten summer.

  Vasec and I sit beside him and play draughts. This is just right for Vasec because he can spend his intelligence completely on the game, he can exhaust himself, his passion, his nerves, his intelligence; as for me—well, I have a reserve over to go on with. We sit here precisely and have orgy after orgy of game until Vasec leans back exhausted, dribbling with concentration. All the while Hamlet is perpetuated in the little white cot in the corner, his claws holding the sheets, his face settled like a quicksand: if you stare down on him you are drawn down, in ever-widening vortices, to a level of concentration which is magma. The lotus-depths in which my mind is the only one really at home. The others are shy of it, even the old man. He allows me to say insolently to him “You have mistaken your role. I AM THE HEALER: and you are destroying all that is curative in me.” He scents truth, but is too clandestine to concur. How quiet the others have been since I entered. The dancer does no harm, poor gazelle. In the moonlight he waits for the flock of terrified deer to catch up with him: and they go down together among the lilies. Their hooves have beautiful gnomic patterns. Even Vasec is spending his virtue to a small degree these days, his dome enters heaven like a turret and bewilders Ararat. I teach him about Tibet, about the monasteries hanging there and the terrible cogitations of the necromancers opening over the icebound lakes, the shawls, the dragons, the aura of mind brooding in the atmosphere of snow: the butter-lamps smouldering by the shrine, the prayer-wheels, the yak, and the hermit. It seems that sometimes he too has met God. A little yellow man in a wash-drawing, brooding over a motionless swanpan. Enough.

  I record this, not out of agony but simply that when you come on Tuesday you will have no fear: you will be more or less acquainted with our grammar. I saw you sitting in the chair last night. Dear, he meant nothing: Vasec is a sacrificial lamb. To touch your knees under the coloured silk—was that culpable? The Dancer is agitated b
y the delicate thwarted silk in which you are sheathed. They have given him some of his own: he has made his lips up and now dances for us with grave delicacy, like a performing child. Last night he came running to me gravely with his hands on his chest: “Look,” he said, “she has given me breasts to perpetuate. They are growing. Feel.” He is luckier than Fifi or I. He is more adult than Pieter or the Starfish. That is why when you sit on the chair and do not know how to speak to us, I want you to realize our blood-brothership. Do not stammer and blush—you are beautiful enough as you are. It is impossible to believe that you are tribal: that you are a member of the sects which carry cancer with them and sordes, anoia and mucilage, syrtes, tabes, Glaxo, compound interest and compound fracture. Are you one of them? If you were not you would not puzzle over this … actually it is great pathos, do not smile. By request of the management, do not smile. Weep for Lycidas, neither fish nor fruit, vegetable, mineral nor oracle. This is my crucifix. I am taken down roughly. I think of you, and my mind is whirling with a million chisels, I am apostate, heretic, traitor … would you say “hallucinated by the absolute?”

  The nights now are full of the snow’s jargon and the beatitudes of the frost; a million inimical jewels bathed in suds and set in the gleaming ouch of the lawns. The Dancer is the artificer of moonlight as I told you; his felicities are incarnated in a world where there is no obstructing flesh—ankle, thenar, palm, wrist—but only a flight of Mind in a hollow alphabet of symbols. Only the indestructible atom of spirit in its lawless method. Only the moon. He has covered the last crater alone, his foes cherishing the last raving crater of Copernicus, of Vega, the Milky Way ringing under his fingers like the stops of an empty flute. Is it I who am too precise for you—or is it your mind in which the real is partitioned off from the symbol? The Dancer knows that it is not only the polarized light which causes his method. Observe the mild, hairless face—the lips carbonized by laughter. I tell you he knows.

  For the rest of us they have reserved a label. There is amusia, aphasia, aboulia, alexia, agraphia, and anoia. When the men in white coats want, they go to market like so many ducks for them. We shrug our shoulders and turn away. What? On the evidence of some printer’s devil, a charred syllable of Roman-Greek origin, are we incarcerated here among the snow? It is too true, I assure you. I have thought of writing to The Times once or twice: but what use? The Times itself is one of the causes of the trouble. I content myself in drafting out the invitations to the garden-party, to be held at the fool moon, among parasols and inanities. I shall appear among them disguised as a bishop. It will be ironic—among these starched churchmen who faint away if they catch a glimpse of a real man of God. I shall offer a first prize for the mind which is most orderly in its arrangement: the mind that most resembles a vegetable garden. The tea-cups will be brimming with polarized light, the parasols hectic with dinosaurs. There will be speeches to memorize. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, etc.… I shall carry not a batch of notes, but simply a fountain-pen in my hand. I shall say, without fraud: “Come. Enter into the creative activity in which you do not need your understandings. Do not mistake truth for the possessive process any longer—ratiocination, knowledge. The real desire is to be possessed” After that chaos will reign, followed by silence in which nothing is heard but the creaking of dowagers’ corsets. Local boy makes good!

  But all this writing is embezzlement. I am avoiding news because everything topical has become dangerous with the images of you. At night I climb the lighthouse stairs to where the great lamps burn, and peer out on the novelty of the horizons which for others do not exist. Tibet laid out like a rotten jawbone among the foot-hills, the vertiginous polarized greenery, the scabs of emerald moss, the deodar, the leopard, the snows exploding in space, exhaling rainbows.… A breath of numen, where the Chinamen sit in the lotus pose and the nights are fuliginous with fables. Underneath me I can dimly hear the shuttles weaving the calendar: the looms creating Tuesday, which is solid flesh, hip and ankle, and half-mine at that.

  Beside me I have Judas, who whispers incessantly all night, as the continents roll by in a vertigo of heraldry, and the clouds numb visibility. He too is owned by a label, more seriously than the rest. It is so certain, his symptoms, that they cannot see him any more—only the label. It is a medical horoscope they devise for him, situated comfortably in the middle-brain, the hind-brain, and the semi-circular canals. Sarcoma is his middle name, while he is allowed to sign his cheques KATATONIA. Actually he is an old seraph with a congealed back, who every morning washes his face in the chamber-pot and flings the bed-clothes out of the window. This is to air the room thoroughly. His moustaches are so long that he is forced to draw the ends up round his ears. He sits by me in the lighthouse with immense care, as if he were piloting an airplane—which proves that for him also the scenery changes. But he will not tell me what he sees. Speech has become too imperfect a foil: has snapped off at the hilt. Only this susurrus, which is gnomic, tribal, ritual. The birds wheel up against the lighted glass in heavy flocks, but he does not utter. There is a moving sea of wings beating outside, a cataract of sea-mew and petrel and albatross, but I am alone in my visual I. Towards dawn he will creep up and kiss me softly on the cheek. Then run away immediately crying, “Betrayed. Betrayed.” If my face could move in the right way I could manage a laugh.

  Where there is conscience there is schism. Judas is not consoled by the vistas, but walks all day chinking the blood-money in his trouser-pocket and looking for the place of skulls. He has no notion of you when you come to see us, which makes me angry because I cherish you in the light of their envy. I delight in your impact—the silk throwing its colours among our insane white. When Vasec touches your cheek, verifying the delicate aligned plates of bone in your skull under the malleable flesh, I blush with you—but for joy and exclusion. Cheeks as soft as yeast, and powerful. You are amazed at our candour? I tell you, now that the defined limit of language has fallen open on its hinges, there is no room for chicanery. We are more valid than human beings—in a gentlemanly way. We beat ploughshares into words, with all purity of diction. It is a state of being more lucid than Euclid. We are an insoluble proposition, to which the hypotenuse has been lost. Perhaps you will enter Golgotha one day yourself in a tragic attempt to find me. All this is data which I gather up for you: a chart written in a fine deft hand: but the treasure is buried. X marks no spot at all.

  Last night I was writing again: the intangible glyphs from the new book of the dead. You see even here there are lucid moments for us—though perhaps not in precisely the sense you and yours would sanction. But lucid, lucent, hallucid—yes, I am sure. The whole of my life was fallen suddenly on paper, the apple-trees, the farm, the hot garrisons of pied daisies, the children incessant, the piercing innocence, the cattle-like camphor-scented mummies in the opaque evenings. Lucent. My God, we had recovered the world in which the old millwheel thumped its million candlepower concussions under the bridge. You climb the rusty girder, naked. Flex back the arch of spine, gather the clouds, staunch back the fine ankles, poise for the dive. The pool glows back its membrane of ink: the dermis studded in the scorched kissing of kingcups. Then fall, the flesh of body like an axe into the underworld, and I am woken from my paper in this opaque room, this white sanity of winter, to grovel on the floor, whimpering, trying to gather the broken components of water up into a reasonable image: a still-life from the land of the no longer living. This is too curt. The last service of the body, I suppose, is in the Death: the music-room where is the absolute counterpoint of God, unrolling its empty dialogues of silence into time. Death is that white status which it is no longer necessary to contemplate. For me, there remains only the journey, the outbound express into the wilderness of lightwaves, clocked by no milestones, fooled by no flags, the red and the green, stopped by no signal. Arctic Ultimate. You see? At last I have learned the bitter lesson—to speak for myself. I have recovered from the wounds already—other men, they were my wounds. I speak from the sha
rpened pencil of the self now, vicious as graphite, as keen—tragically, only as durable. Giant, you are mortal! I accept the kisses of Judas now with reserve, swing a glove, and ask patiently what wood they have chosen, what time it begins. The journey has begun. In whatever direction I move it is travel, the anatomy of voyage.