The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘To the idle observer, if any such could have secured entry to his hermitage, it might have appeared that Nico spent much of his day gazing dreamily out of the windows or in supine contemplation of the sky, stirring only occasionally to make a few fragmentary notes or drawings. For he had dedicated himself to what I suppose we should term nephosophy, knowledge of the clouds, though he gave it no such grand term: he always referred simply to his “studies”. He shared with me, however, in half-mockingly naming his upper room as his “nephoseum” and indeed it was a library, observatory, gallery and temple of the clouds all in one for him.

  ‘For he was convinced that there was much to be gained by attentive reveries upon the evanescence of the clouds, and that the semblance of a slow, stately procession that we see, or on wind-driven days the soaring passage as of an ethereal white fleet in full sail, could be particularly conducive to a state of mind which might yield up strange insights. Further, he observed that the fine hues and tints of first dawn, sunset and moonrise added such lustre and luminosity to the kinesis of the clouds as to bring us into the presence of an even more charged mystery, whose effect upon us was so much more than could be explained by mere meteorology. So he made it his mission to observe and speculate upon the ever-changing cloud rites that he saw in the sky, each day eliciting some few phrases of tentative insight or some swift etching hinting at what he had seen.’

  My friend paused, rose and busied himself in preparing for us each a glass of delicate, cooled Keemun tea, which he scented appreciatively for a few moments as if to fortify himself. Then he resumed his narrative.

  ‘I remember one evening a long slow dusk in which his little peninsula and the cottage of aconite-white were unstirred by the slightest breath. We had tilted open the high windows in the nephoseum on the upper floor, which reached from a low sill up almost to the roof-tree, and we lay upon couches and gazed out across the westerly sea at the fine, soft-burning fuse of a sunset as it lit the faint fronds of clouds that hovered there.

  ‘We saw richly misted strands of deep red and blue-purple, like the ancient illuminating inks of Abassid manuscripts, all sanguine and indigo, with here and there embellishments of stranger colours still, the aching yellow of Hormuz ochre, the metallic glinting of orpiment green. It was as if these were the faint ichors emanating from the smouldering growths in the mythical gardens of the Hashish King, the palpitant roses, the faintly haloed orchids, the singing vivid poppies; as if we witnessed the unleashed essences of those flowers, pervading the air of some far spiritual paradise.

  ‘Nico lay enraptured, encaptured indeed by this spectacle, his hallowed consciousness reaching out to the beautiful purposeless ritual before us, drawn ineluctably to those summoning nectaries of the soul, unheedful of any other thing until the last dark lavender ghost of cirrus wisp had drowned in the murky umber of the ocean.

  ‘At the end of eveningfall he could be induced to part from his preoccupations and to talk a little about the tendency of his thought. Though he might appear to some as a man in the talons of a delusive obsession, yet he spoke very clearly of his purpose. I shall have to paraphrase what he put to me in our long starlit discussions in the higher room, and in so doing shall doubtless coarsen the delicate insights of a gossamer consciousness: yet I must still try.’

  The Connoisseur paused, lowered his eyelids and sipped a little of the Keemun. Then he resumed, hesitantly.

  ‘All around us we see abundant creativity. Nature is rife, overflowing with it, so much of it unseen or at least undiscerned by the really keen, appreciative eye. To make a study of the inner glory and grotesquerie of a single spinney, say, or one outcrop of rock, would be the work of several lifetimes: we may never truly know any further terrain than that. Nowhere is this strange profligacy more visible to us than in the ever-forming, ever-dissolving cloudscapes and in the burning pageantry of sunsets—as if we are able to witness a ceaseless stream of new works of a vast art-magic, the molten imaginings of a mind whose powers we can scarcely comprehend.

  ‘Yes, many before have marvelled at such things and have seen in them some promise of a mystic creator. Yet Nico’s speculations went beyond this. He thought that we, too, might aspire to the same vast artistry, sorcery. To him the clouds—and other things, such as limpid, lucent, ever-rushing streams, or the unseen, soaring presence of wind in the trees—are the physical symbols set before us of what could be for us too. These vital, quickened abstractions of colour, light, form, movement tell us what we could attain to, if we could sufficiently prepare and pare open our minds.

  ‘Once, excitedly, he told me of an ally he had found for his theories, in that old prophet George MacDonald, who, in his quaint theistic language, had clearly come close to similar insights, such as in this verse (The Connoisseur frowned in concentration):

  What if Thou make us able to make like Thee?

  To light with moon, to clothe with greenery

  To hang gold sunsets o’er a rose-purple sea …

  ‘I remember Nico turning to me with his fair eyebrows formed in a frown, a fierce blue-fire look in his pale eyes, and asking: “Seriously: what could we do with the elements, the dimensions and the spectrum, all at our utter disposal, though these too are only symbols of the infinite essences and qualities we should really have? What beauty, what ugliness would we form if we had the power of melding thought to creation in a mere flicker of time? If consciousness itself could instantaneously and incessantly transform potentiality into actuality?” ’

  The Connoisseur halted again and collected his thoughts.

  ‘He became convinced that a proper purification of the body and preparation of the soul, a shedding of all the grosser encumbrances of earthly life, would leave one prepared to become an active, creative participant in the great and endless rite he saw enacted before us. To this end, his regime, always ascetic, became sterner still, so that when I next visited him he seemed like some gemmed-eye wraith from a morbid drawing of Harry Clarke, pallid of face, scant of flesh, yet with eyes still a clear and crystalline blue.

  ‘At sundown, his day’s studies complete, the clouds this night unlit by the moon, he was willing to speak again of his work. He told me that he believed he was near to perfecting the way—that was his simple name for the process of fasting, vigil, meditation, silence and stillness that he had imposed upon himself as the route to the higher reaches of consciousness. “The shapes I have seen in the clouds, I have begun to see in this very room,” he told me, smiling wryly—“or at least the first halting outline of them. That name you gave it, the nephoseum, is coming more nearly true. I believe I shall soon begin to body them forth and, if once I can create even the barest form, I shall then be ready with a sudden exultant lunge, as I believe it will be, to generate more fully vivified work. Look …”

  ‘He showed me the austere drawings he had done in coarse charcoal, the strange strokes of black he had descended onto the panels of rag paper. I confess I shuddered a little at these, thinking that if they hinted at what he might be able to usher out from nothingness, then I would not be sure that they came without peril. They were merely pure angled lines of darkness, it is true, yet they seemed intense with meaning, even perhaps purpose.’

  Our glances both strayed across to the sketch lying solemnly on my friend’s writing desk. The Connoisseur strode across to it and replaced it in the slender case from whence it had been drawn.

  ‘It was not without some foreboding,’ he continued, ‘that I left him that final time. I was concerned, naturally, at the mortifications to which he subjected himself, but I understood that these were the common practice of mystics throughout the ages and in many cultures, and that so far from being harsh and arid as they might appear to the outsider they are in reality productive of the sharpest joys and keenest ecstasies.

  ‘No: these did not trouble me, though I knew they must also be admingled with gentleness and rest, and tried to urge both of these upon him. What harried at the back of my mind was the convic
tion that, though so much deeper a student than I in these most singular of studies, nevertheless Nico had ventured too far without some sustaining ritual system, that he had not given sufficient thought to what his explorations might yield up.

  ‘There were many weeks of silence after my last visit and, though such durations were not uncommon, I began to feel a mounting unease. I corresponded with those few other intimates he had made, and they too had heard nothing for a good while. At length, two of us—myself and Gaspard, the explorer of the Caspian lands and keen esotericist—made our way to the white cottage, all fearful of what we might find.

  ‘Tall, olive-skinned and somewhat fierce of face, Gaspard led me at a rather ennervating pace across the wan moorland, studded with crabbed gorse and clenched boulders of wind-scoured stone. He too had tried to dissuade Valdervane from pursuing his visions too far. His soaring voice rose across the barren place we traversed: “Think what man has wrought upon this earth with just the brute manufactory skills we already have, the crude tools at our present disposal: and shudder then at what barbarities, what hideous stream of malcreations might emanate if ever such minds achieved this far vaster power that Valdervane spoke of—speaks of, I mean. He has been too enchanted by the beauty and the mystery: he has forgotten the foulness and the dark inanitions that are part of all of us too. Even he, with his chastened flesh and annealed mind, cannot evade these… .”

  ‘We marched on then for many paces in silence until the pale outline of Nico’s home could be seen ahead on the dun-coloured headland. As we approached, our gazes ranged across the country around in case we should catch a glimpse of him, but there was nothing but a sullen vacancy all around. I think we both had an encroaching sense of futility yet we kept up the outer impression that we expected to find him as soon as we arrived at the house, or at least some note indicating where he had gone.

  ‘We found the door open as always, and the lower rooms neatly disposed with his few mundane possessions much as they always were, and though there was no food in the larder this was not in itself very unusual, as he would frequently run down his stocks and then walk to the village to replenish them. We ascended the bare wooden stairs into his upper chamber: it too was empty, empty at least of the presence of our friend. Despite the sunlight streaming in from the angled windows like great golden trumpet blasts, there was an odd coolness and dimness up there and our shadows on the dusty floorboards flickered as if not quite tied to our own forms. Again, all was carefully composed in the room, with none of the signs of fervent study that usually characterised the place—scattered notes, books piled in miniature ziggurats, pens and pencils left around to be snatched up when required—none of these.

  ‘We both scanned the headland, more in desperation than in hope, but no figure was to be seen, only down towards the water’s edge a few black wheeling shapes rather like ragged jackdaws, or such I supposed them to be. We watched these for a little while, still craning intently for sight of some more reassuring figure, as if the very keenness of our gaze might summon him into being.

  ‘As we drew away from the dreary vista, Gaspard stared at me hard for a few intervals, but said nothing. We were possessed by the urge for purposeful activity and so we pushed open the two great sea-chests where Nico kept his papers. His almanac, the record of those fragments of thought he wished to preserve, lay plainly on top of one of them, below it the rougher drafts he retained only for a while, and below these his books. In the other, there were the sketches, many of them, but all careful variations upon the same curved black figures you have seen. The last entry in his diary read simply: “the play of shadows”, in his slim uncial script in still-shiny black ink.

  ‘Seven years since,’ sighed The Connoisseur, ‘and no sign of him. We have closed up his cottage carefully and preserved it: and we pay a caretaker in the village to keep it swept and weatherproofed. We have each of us taken some single memento of him, but the rest we have left there in case he should return and resume his—studies, or in case we shall find some scholar who can unravel his mystery.

  ‘But it is Gaspard’s view that Valdervane knew at the last that what he had brought out could not be untainted by the darker energies and instincts at work in all of us, even in so rarefied a being as he: and that he has gone to some remote place far from the haunts of man to find if it is possible to uncreate that flux of twisted spirit-made-matter that finally came from him—or perhaps to him. I recoil from the cold courage of such an act, for I do not like what I might imagine from that phrase of his, “the play of shadows”, nor what the fate might be of one who was the prey of such play.

  ‘There is only a brief candle-flicker of chance that in his last inscription we should see an innocence and a delight in that word “play”, the play of shadows, and that somewhere out on that lonely coast, perhaps, he achieved that apotheosis, that fullest emergence into the great rite that he sought, and found that then he had no use for his physical form.’

  Sea Citadels

  I dashed through the wind-torn, rain-thrashed streets, where all the amber of the lamps seemed faded and drawn, as if their strength were being sucked into the darkness of the storm; their weak, wan reflections squirmed underfoot on the glistening paths.

  Few other venturers were abroad, but I felt an intense exultation at the soaring and gusting that seemed at times either to thrust me along towards my destination, or to stay my progress and urge me back. My raincoat flapped as if it wished to turn itself into a pair of voluminous herringbone wings, while several times I had to chase my hat as it flung itself into the surging throng.

  At last I reached the secluded byway where my friend The Connoisseur, savant of the strange and the recondite, had his modest rooms. He greeted me cordially and busied himself at a silver samovar in one corner of his parlour, preparing an infusion of his own concoction, steeped in borage and sweetened with meadow honey. As I let the warmth from this drink and the purring fire in his stone grate enter into my tightened limbs, I gazed ruefully out of the arched windows at the whistling cascade outside.

  My friend took his accustomed place and beckoned me to mine, an ancient armchair adorned with an heraldic antimacassar in vivid embroidery.

  ‘It is on nights such as these,’ he began, ‘though we are so far inland, that my thoughts often turn to the seas that surround us. There are gale warnings in every part, according to the wireless.’

  He pointed to the oak oblong on the sideboard, with its ceramic controls, beige mesh, black dial with white numerals, and single green eye. ‘But it is not only of “those in peril . . .”, as the old prayer has it, that I am reminded… .’

  The Connoisseur reached down a tall album bound in what might have been black oilskin, and opened it with some care before passing it over to me. It held a chart in which segments of the sea-coast of Britain had been plotted out and named. Each name was limned in a frame of a lunging wave, like the unfurling of a great scroll; and each region was embellished with picturesque devices such as chimerical beasts, craggy pinnacles, or illumined towers.

  ‘It is by Edgar Shepherd,’ he explained. ‘I was introduced to Shepherd by Ivo Tradescant. You may recall from that curious episode of the tableaux vivants that Ivo has two particular interests: the ancient celebrations of the Mysteries, and unusual kinds of performance. You can imagine that he was delighted when he found in Shepherd a character whose work has aspects of both, even if his approach might seem rather irreverent.

  ‘All of his art has been a celebration of these islands,’ he continued, reflectively. ‘A celebration—and yet also a subversion. And illustrating such as this is the least of his work, in fact a mere emblem of it. For Edgar Shepherd belongs with those figures who combine the performer, the provocateur, the mountebank and the magician in proportions which seem to vary each time you see them. Certainly he looks the part. He has that wonderfully pronged Van Dyke beard, with the haughtily jaunty moustaches, those languid-lidded eyes and jagged, lightning-strike eye-brows: and he a
lways affects a long cloak-like garment that one almost expects to be decorated with golden occult emblems.

  ‘I have been to quite a few of his “enactments”, as he likes to call them, and there is no mistaking their originality. One of the most noted was, I suppose, his At The Crested Griffin. He had persuaded Goodwin, the landlord of a remote and fairly untouched tavern in the Staffordshire moorlands, to give it over to him for one evening. It was re-named for the occasion from The White Hart to The Crested Griffin, with a suitably resplendent sign painted by Shepherd, showing the winged creature in gold and scarlet glory. Shepherd has gathered about him quite a troupe of like-minded art-magic japesters, amused and inspired by him. As well as these, an invited audience turned up for the event and were perhaps abashed to find themselves offered a programme which appeared to consist of all the usual pub games: but it transpired that these had all been slightly twisted awry.

  ‘Darts, for example, was played on a board in which the numbers were replaced by astrological sigils, while the bull’s eye was a flaming red-maned sun. Cribbage was played in more or less the usual way, but the peg board was in the form of an obelisk shaped from polished walnut, deeply radiant, and the players’ scores ascended and descended upon this.

  ‘These games, at least, proceeded in a recognisable fashion, but for the Dominoes the majority of the black tablets had been left blank (to signify the void, it seems) with only a very few embellished with white stars, some in the shapes of curious constellations. Playing Shove Ha’penny, one was given a specially struck One Obol piece in worn, blurred copper, dimly depicting a hooded figure on a narrow skiff; and the board was painted with a series of wavy rivers, in darkening shades of blue from aquamarine to damson, interspersed with silvery-green islands decorated with stylised versions of paradisal gardens: the trick was to negotiate the doleful waters and land your soul-coin on these sanctuaries, in a certain sequence.