by John Fowles
Then came a strange illusion; that I was not looking up, but down into space, as one looks down a well.
Then there was no clearly situated and environmented self; there was the star, not closer but with something of the isolation a telescope gives; not one of a pattern of stars, but itself, floating in the blue-black breath of space, in a kind of void. I remember very clearly this sense, this completely new strange perceiving of the star as a ball of white light both breeding and needing the void around it; of, in retrospect, a related sense that I was exactly the same, suspended in a dark void. I was watching the star and the star was watching me. We were poised, exactly equal weights, if one can think of awareness as a weight, held level in a balance. This seemed to endure and endure, I don’t know how long, two entities equally suspended in a void, equally opposite, devoid of any meaning or feeling. There was no sensation of beauty, of morality, of divinity, of physical geometry; simply the sensation of the situation. As an animal might feel.
Then a rise of tension. I was expecting something. The waiting was a waiting for. I did not know if it would be audible or visible, which sense. But it was trying to come, and I was trying to discover its coming. There seemed to be no more star. Perhaps he had made me close my eyes. The void was all. I remember two words, Conchis must have spoken them: glisten, and listen. There was the glistening, listening void; darkness and expectation. Then there came a wind on my face, a perfectly physical sensation. I tried to face it, it was fresh and warm, but I suddenly realized, with an excited shock, not at anything but the physical strangeness of it, that it was blowing on me from all directions at the same time. I raised my hand, I could feel it. The dark wind, like draught from thousands of invisible fans, blowing in on me. And again this seemed to last for a long time.
At some point it began imperceptibly to change. The wind became light. I don’t think there was any visual awareness of this, it was simply that I knew, without surprise, that the wind had become light (perhaps Conchis had told me the wind was light) and this light was intensely pleasing, a kind of mental sunbathing after a long dark winter, an exquisitely agreeable sensation both of being aware of light and attracting it. Of having power to attract and power to receive this light.
From this stage I moved to one where it dawned on me that this was something intensely true and revealing; this being something that drew all this light upon it. I mean it seemed to reveal something deeply significant about being; I was aware of existing, and this being aware of existing became more significant than the light, just as the light had become more significant than the wind. I began to get a sense of progress, that I was transforming, as a fountain in a wind is transformed in shape; an eddy in the water. The wind and the light became mere secondaries, roads to the present state, this state without dimensions or sensations; awareness of pure being. Or perhaps that is a solipsism; it was simply a pure awareness.
That lasted; and then changed, like the other states. This state was being imposed on me from outside, I knew this, I knew that although it did not flow in on me like the wind and the light, it nevertheless flowed, though flowed was not the word. There was no word, it arrived, descended, penetrated from outside. It was not an immanent state, it was a conferred state, a presented state. I was a recipient. But once again there came this strange surprise that the emitters stood all around me. I was not receiving from any one direction, but from all directions; though once again, direction is too physical a word. I was having feelings that no language based on concrete physical objects, on actual feeling, can describe. I think I was aware of the metaphorically of what I felt. I knew words were like chains, they held me back; and like walls with holes in them. Reality kept rushing through; and yet I could not get out to fully exist in it. This is interpreting what I struggled to remember feeling; the act of description taints the description.
I had the sense that this was the fundamental reality and that reality had a universal mouth to tell me so; no sense of divinity, of communion, of the brotherhood of man, of anything I had expected before I became suggestible. No pantheism, no humanism. But something much wider, cooler and more abstruse. That reality was endless interaction. No good, no evil; no beauty, no ugliness. No sympathy, no antipathy. But simply interaction. The endless solitude of the one, its total enislement from all else, seemed the same thing as the total inter-relationship of the all. All opposites seemed one, because each was indispensable to each. The indifference and the indispensability of all seemed one. I suddenly knew, but in a new hitherto unexperienced sense of knowing, that all else exists.
Knowing, willing, being wise, being good, education, information, classification, knowledge of all kinds, sensibility, sexuality, these things seemed superficial. I had no desire to state or define or analyse this interaction, I simply wished to constitute it – not even ‘wished to’ – I constituted it. I was volitionless. There was no meaning. Only being.
But the fountain changed, the eddy whirled. It seemed at first to be a kind of reversion to the stage of the dark wind breathing in on me from every side, except that there was no wind, the wind had been only a metaphor, and now it was millions, trillions of such consciousnesses of being, countless nuclei of hope suspended in a vast solution of hazard, a pouring out not of photons, but nöons, consciousness-of-being particles. An enormous and vertiginous sense of the innumerability of the universe; an innumerability in which transience and unchangingness seemed integral, essential and uncontradictory. I felt like a germ that had landed, like the first penicillin microbe, not only in a culture where it was totally at home, totally nourished; but in a situation in which it was infinitely significant. A condition of acute physical and intellectual pleasure, a floating suspension, a being perfectly adjusted and related; a quintessential arrival. An intercognition.
At the same time a parabola, a fall, an ejaculation; but the transience, the passage, had become an integral part of the knowledge of the experience. The becoming and the being were one.
I think I saw the star again for a while, the star as it simply was, hanging in the sky above, but now in all its being-and-becoming. It was like walking through a door, going all round the world, and then walking through the same door but a different door.
Then darkness. I remember nothing.
Then light.
37
Someone had knocked on the door. I was staring at a wall. I was in bed, I was wearing pyjamas, my clothes were folded on the chair. It was daylight, very early, the first thin sunlight on the tops of the pines outside. I looked at my watch. Just before six o’clock.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I had a black plunge of shame, of humiliation; of having been naked in front of Conchis, of having been in his power; even worse, others could have seen. Julie. I saw myself lying there and all of them sitting and grinning while Conchis asked me questions and I gave naked answers. But Julie – he must also hypnotize her; this was why she could not lie.
Svengali and Trilby.
Then the mystical experience itself, still so vivid, as clear as a learnt lesson, as the details of a drive in new country, hit me. I saw how it had been done. There would have been some drug, some hallucinogene in the raki – perhaps the Stramonium of his paper. Then he had suggested these things, these stages of knowledge, he had induced them as I lay there helpless. I looked round for the green-bound volume of his medical papers. But it was not in the room. I was to be denied even that clue.
The richness of what I remembered; the potential embarrassment of what I could not; the good of it and the evil of it; these two things made me sit for minutes with my head in my hands, torn between resentment and gratitude.
I went and washed, stared at myself in the mirror, went down to the coffee the silent Maria had waiting for me. I knew Conchis would not appear. Maria would say nothing. Nothing was to be explained, everything was planned to keep me in suspense until I came again.
As I walked back to the school, I tried to assess the experience; why, though it was so be
autiful, so intensely real, it seemed also so sinister. It was difficult in that early-morning light and landscape to believe that anything on earth was sinister, yet the feeling persisted with me and it was not only one of humiliation. It was one of new danger, of meddling in darker, stranger things that needed to be meddled with. It also made Julie’s fear of Conchis much more convincing than his pseudo-medical pity for her; she might just be schizophrenic, but he was proven a hypnotist. But this was to assume that they were not working together to trick me; and then I began clawing, in a panic of memory, through all my meetings with Conchis, trying to see if he could ever have hypnotized me before, without my being aware of it …
I remembered bitterly that only the afternoon before I had said to Julie that my sense of reality was like gravity. For a while I was like a man in space, whirling through madness. I remembered Conchis’s trance-like state during the Apollo scene. Had he hypnotized me into imagining it all? Had he willed me to go to sleep when I did that afternoon, so conveniently placed for the Foulkes apparition? Had there ever been a man and a girl standing there? Now Julie even … but I recalled the feel of her skin, of those ungiving lips. I got back to earth. But I was badly shaken.
It was not only the being hypnotized by Conchis that unanchored me; in a subtler but similar way I knew I had been equally hypnotized by the girl. I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive. It wasn’t only that I foresaw a very steep bill with Julie; she shook my whole theory. She had a certain exhalation of surrender about her, as if she was a door waiting to be pushed open; but it was the darkness beyond that held me. Perhaps it was partly a nostalgia for that extinct Lawrentian woman of the past, the woman inferior to man in everything but that one great power of female dark mystery and beauty; the brilliant, virile male and the dark, swooning female. The essences of the two sexes had become so confused in my androgynous twentieth-century mind that this reversion to a situation where a woman was a woman and I was obliged to be fully a man had all the fascination of an old house after a cramped, anonymous modern flat. I had been enchanted into wanting sex often enough before; but never into wanting love.
All that morning I sat in classes, teaching as if I was still hypnotized, in a dream of hypotheses. Now I saw Conchis as a sort of psychiatric novelist sans novel, creating with people, not words; now I saw him as a complicated but still very perverse old man; now as a Svengali; now as a genius among practical jokers. But whichever way I saw him I was fascinated, and Julie, as Lily with her hair blown sideways, with her tear-stained face, at that first moment, in the lamplight, cool ivory … I didn’t try to pretend that I was anything else than quite literally bewitched by Bourani. It was almost a force, like a magnet, drawing me out of the classroom windows, through the blue air to the central ridge, and down there where I so wanted to be. The rows of olive-skinned faces, bent black heads, the smell of chalk-dust, an old inkstain that rorschached my desk – they were like things in a mist, real yet unreal; obstacles in limbo.
After lunch Demetriades came into my room and wanted to know who Alison was; and began being obscene, dreadful stock Greek facetiae about tomatoes and cucumbers, when I refused to tell him anything. I shouted at him to fuck off; had to push him out by force. He was offended and spent the rest of that week avoiding me. I didn’t mind. It kept him out of my way.
After my last lesson I couldn’t resist it. I had to go back to Bourani. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had to re-enter the domaine. As soon as I saw it, the hive of secrets lying in the last sunshine over the seething pine-tops, far below, I was profoundly relieved, as if it might not have been still there. The closer I got, the more nefarious I felt, and the more nefarious I became. I simply wanted to see them; to know they were there, waiting for me.
I approached at dusk from the east, slipped between the wire, and walked down cautiously past the statue of Poseidon, over the gulley, and through the trees to where I could see the house. Every window at the side was shuttered up. There was no smoke from Maria’s cottage. I worked round to where I could see the front of the house. The french windows under the colonnade were shuttered. So were the ones that led from Conchis’s bedroom on to the terrace. It was clear that no one was there. I walked back through the darkness, feeling depressed, and increasingly furious that Conchis could spirit his world away; deprive me of it, like a callous drug-ward doctor with some hooked addict.
The next day I wrote a letter to Mitford, telling him that I’d been to Bourani, met Conchis, and begging him to come clean on his own experience there. I sent it to the address in Northumberland.
I also saw Karazoglou again, and tried to coax more information out of him. He was obviously quite sure that Leverrier had never met Conchis. He told me what I already knew, that Leverrier had been ‘religious’; he had used to go to Mass in Athens. And he said more or less the same as Conchis: ‘Il avait toujours l’air un peu triste, il ne s’est jamais habitué à la vie ici.’ Yet Conchis had also said that he had made an excellent ‘seeker’.
I got Leverrier’s address in England out of the school bursar, but then decided not to write; I had it to hand if I needed it.
I also did a little research on Artemis. She was Apollo’s sister in mythology; protectress of virgins and patroness of hunters. The saffron dress, the buskins and the silver bow (the crescent new moon) constituted her standard uniform in classical poetry. Though she seemed permanently trigger-happy where amorous young men were concerned I could find no mention of her being helped by her brother. She was ‘an element in the ancient matriarchal cult of the Triple Moon-goddess, linked with Astarte in Syria and Isis in Egypt’. Isis, I noted, was often accompanied by the jackal-headed Anubis, guardian of the underworld, who later became Cerberus.
On Tuesday and Wednesday prep duties kept me at the school. On Thursday I went over to Bourani again. Nothing had changed. It was as deserted as it had been on the Monday.
I walked round the house, tried the shutters, roamed the grounds, went down to the private beach, from which the boat was gone. Then I sat brooding for half an hour in the twilight under the colonnade. I felt both exploited and excluded, and as much angry with myself as with them. I was mad to have got involved in the whole business, and even madder both to want it to go on and be frightened of its going on. I had changed my mind once again in those intervening days. More and more I no longer knew about the schizophrenia; from faintly possible it began to grow probable. I could not imagine why else he should have halted the masque so abruptly. If it had been only an amusement…
I suppose there was a large component of envy too – I thought of Conchis’s foolishness, or arrogance, in leaving the Modigliani and the Bonnards like that, in a deserted house … and from those Bonnards, my mind grasshoppered to Alison. There was that day a special midnight boat to take the boys and masters back to Athens for their half-term holiday. It meant sitting up all night dozing in an armchair in the scruffy first-class saloon, but it gave one the Friday in Athens. I’m not quite sure what it was – anger, spite, revenge? -that made me decide to take the boat. It was certainly not the thought of Alison, beyond a need of someone to talk to. Perhaps it was a last whiff of my old would-be existentialist self: founding freedom on caprice.
A minute later I was walking fast down the track to the gate. Even then, at the last moment I looked back and hoped, with one-thousandth of a hope, that someone might be beckoning me to return.
But no one was. So I embarked for my lack of a better.
38
Athens was dust and drought, ochre and drab. Even the palm trees looked exhausted. All the humanity in human beings had retreated behind dark skins and even darker glasses, and by two in the afternoon the streets
were empty, abandoned to indolence and heat. I lay slumped on a bed in a Piraeus hotel, and dozed fitfully in the shuttered twilight. The city was doubly too much for me. After Bourani, the descent back into the age, the machinery, the stress, was completely disorientating.
The afternoon dragged out its listless hours. The closer I came to meeting Alison, the more muddle-motived I grew. I knew that if I was in Athens at all, it was out of a desire to play my own double game with Conchis. Twenty-four hours before, under the colonnade, Alison had seemed a pawn to be used – at least one counter-move I could make; but now, two hours before meeting … sex with her was unthinkable. So too, so close, was to tell her what was happening at Bourani. I no longer knew why I had come. I felt strongly tempted to sneak away back to the island. I wanted neither to deceive Alison nor to reveal the truth.
Yet something kept me lying there, some remnant of interest in hearing what had become of her, some pity, some memory of past affection. I saw it as a kind of test, as well: of both my depth of feeling about Julie and my doubts. Alison could stand for past and present reality in the outer world, and I would put her secretly in the ring with my inner adventure. Also I had hit, during the long night on the boat, on a way of keeping the meeting safely antiseptic-something that would make her feel sorry for me and keep her at arm’s length.
At five I got up, had a shower, and caught a taxi out to the airport. I sat on a bench opposite the long reception counter, then moved away; finding, to my irritation, that I was increasingly nervous. Several other air hostesses passed quickly – hard, trim, professionally pretty, the shallow unreality of characters from science fiction.