by A. S. Byatt
A small child ran across their path, bead-bedecked, crumple-headed. Round a corner was a booth with paper apple-trees and paper geese, and a plywood wicker-gate. Mother Goose’s Orchard. Stories for Children and Child-like Perennial, Second-Childhood, World-weary, Fools and Wisemen, No Ending without a New Beginning. Inside, Deborah Ritter, sitting in a rocking-chair, read aloud.
And Artegall heard the voices of hidden things. The thrush continued to speak, full of itself, scolding. Beyond its clarity, Artegall heard the whisper of beetles chewing dead wood to sawdust, of spiders hissing as they spun their fine traps, of giddy flies murmuring as they blundered past the silk threads. He heard the slow cold speech of the worms, pushing sinuous and blind between compacted layers of leafmould. He heard the glutinous uncoiling of snails in the sunlight, and the infinitesimal cry of hungry larvae in the ants’ nest ...
Marcus observed that there was a pervasive sewery smell. Hodgkiss said, keeping his head down, in a mutter, that he himself should probably be doing something about that. Though some of the land belonged to Dun Vale Hall.
Marcus stiffened.
Hodgkiss asked if he knew what was going on there.
Marcus said, unforthcoming, that it was very intense and religious. He remembered Lucas Simmonds and told his companion that he had a friend there, a girl called Ruth. He said, not quite convincingly
“I worry about her.”
Lucas Simmonds’s face, red and smiling like the sun, rose over the rim of his mind’s eye, and was beaten down. He sighed. Hodgkiss made no comment.
In the Marx-Mao Marquee the Plural Talk had attracted an audience of about thirty-five people, several, if not most, of whom were Hodgkiss’s own students. Avram Snitkin was on his stool in a corner, smiling mildly. There were some school benches. Hodgkiss and Marcus sat together, at one end, at the back. Marcus folded his shoulders inwards and pushed his thin arms down between his legs, like a roosting bat. Vincent Hodgkiss had a vision of his skeleton, like transparent ivory.
Tod and Ross spoke in practised counterpoint. Their verbal javelins, Hodgkiss decided, had points. Tod accused the British of mistaking a passive inertia for an empiricist scepticism. The British evaded concepts, and thus evaded thinking. History, Ross said, taking up the argument, had kept the British padded and insulated from the idea of Revolution. There had been no disturbance since the Civil War in the seventeenth century. Capitalists, bourgeois, and the remaining aristocrats, colluded to persuade the working class that change was impossible and undesirable. Modern French philosophy was all about the conditions for making new concepts. The British denied the need and the possibility.
Tod took over. Look, he said, at modern British philosophy. Wittgenstein’s pupil, Wisdom, thought it was clever to point out that philosophy begins and ends in platitude. Clever-clever Austin praised common language, common sense as the repository of evolved wisdom. Quite apart from whose common language, this was complacent endorsement of all actually existing status quos. Wittgenstein had fled Europe and its turmoils to sit in a rich British university playing language-games which worked because they supposed that there was an unchanging body of ideas and an unalterable pattern of social context governing them.
In Britain, said Waltraut Ross, “ordinary language” masks a fuggy determination to restrict problems to arm-chairs, tennis and tiddlywinks, hypothetical rhinoceroses and whether there are apples or some apples. Outside, people suffer, they live in strait-jackets of mechanical repetition and/or hunger or boredom. They do not believe change is possible, because they don’t know language is a weapon, to be used to make a revolution—to prepare for a total overturning of the system—
Several of Hodgkiss’s students applauded vigorously. One said he had come to study philosophy to understand good and evil, love and meaning, and he was stuck with the semantics of cricket and how to cook fish. Greg Tod applauded him. He looked across at Hodgkiss, who saw that Tod had known from the beginning who he was.
“You,” said Greg Tod. “What do you think?”
Several of the students turned round and noticed Hodgkiss.
“There is something in what you say,” said Hodgkiss.
“There is something in what you say,” cried Waltraut Ross, in a gross parody of Hodgkiss’s Oxford bleat. “English fairness is so appealing.”
Hodgkiss met her cold grey eyes, and saw that what she felt for him was hatred. Impersonal hatred, becoming personal as she stared.
“We don’t want you here,” said Waltraut Ross. “Get out.”
“It’s a free country,” said Hodgkiss, smiling involuntarily.
“That’s precisely the point,” said Greg Tod. “It isn’t a free country. It isn’t a free country, or a just country. Those who are not with us, are against us.”
“A good debate,” said Hodgkiss, “is a model of being both with and against, without actual bodily harm.”
“We aren’t interested in debating you,” said Greg Tod. “We have other, urgent, matters to attend to.”
A kind of sullen murmur began among the students. Hodgkiss was suddenly aware of Marcus’s emotion beside him. It was intense embarrassment. He thought, I can only make myself look silly. He stood up, said to Marcus, “Come on,” and left the marquee. Behind him he heard the rising cry of Waltraut Ross:
“The Establishment always talks about Free Speech. Free Speech is a reification, a mystified absolute value. They use it to suppress questioning, to make all beliefs vapid and identikit, when in fact there are real and urgent—and rightful—causes and projects. Freedom is not the freedom to witter on instead of acting. Freedom means change, and change means action ...”
They avoided the Teach-Inn’s veggie-sandwich bar, and went back to Blesford, where they sat in the Non-Maths Group corner of the Argus Eye and ordered sausage and mash. Hodgkiss was nervously excited. He wondered if he should do anything, and if so what, about the revolutionaries. They had only been rude, and rudeness, in his liberal canon, was not a sin, only a behaviour. Also, he was not thinking clearly because of Marcus. Marcus drank shandy, and said nothing.
“Of course, they are wrong about Wittgenstein’s life,” said Hodgkiss. “He couldn’t bear the Cambridge life-style any more than they could, and for some of the same reasons. He was an ascetic and an extremist. He worked as a hospital porter in the last war, and then as a lab assistant. He actually contributed considerably to a project studying the effects of wound shock in the Blitz. His first contribution was ordinary language. He suggested they stop using the word ‘shock’ which he said wasn’t a diagnosis—didn’t mean anything and masked the problems they should be looking at.”
Marcus said that Wittgenstein appeared to have been both unusual and good. Hodgkiss recognised this as an attempt to talk to him about something he himself was interested in.
“He was good—in an almost saintly way—and impossible. Impossible. He fell in love with young men—characteristically very very clever young men, who understood what he was saying—but also, characteristically, rather innocent young men, biddable young men, natural disciples. Then he ran their lives like a moral tyrant, urging them to work in factories or garages because such work was pure and uncontaminated—morally—”
Marcus withdrew his hand from the fork he had been about to pick up. Hodgkiss, trembling slightly, found himself racing on.
“Odd, really, because Turing, who was the other genius in those sessions on mathematics we were talking of, Turing was the same way. He tried to change himself. He got engaged to a woman, a cryptologist, during the war. He used to show her pine-cones and talk about Fibonacci. But he broke it off. A young man he—so to speak—befriended, robbed his flat, and when he reported the matter to the police, it ended in them prosecuting him. For sex.”
Marcus was silent. Hodgkiss, feeling that he was destroying himself, filled the silence with his own grim and truthful thoughts.
“He was found guilty, of course. It was a choice between a prison sentence and voluntary sub
mission to hormone treatment. To reduce his sexual drive. They filled him full of oestrogen. A female hormone, I’m sure you know. He grew fat, he grew breasts. He made jokes about being Tiresius, an androgyne, but my own view—I’ve known other cases—is that it crazed him. He couldn’t think clearly.”
He was revisited by his own vision of the debonair boy disporting himself amongst high ropes in the roof.
“I think he experienced something like the stress women are said to feel before menstruation. Only perpetually. He killed himself. With an apple dipped in cyanide. In 1954.”
Marcus still said nothing.
“He had a hypothesis about the formation of regular patches—spots, stripes—in natural growths. Zebra skins, butterfly-eyes, peacock feathers, angelfish. What we were talking about the other day, as paradise-gardens. He thought that the forms were made by the physical interaction of two substances, one flowing or expanding, one—which he called a ‘poison’—chemically inhibiting it.”
“I’ve thought of something like that. The maths is very difficult.”
The voice was clear and colourless.
“It is not good to feel that your whole nature is unnatural. Or, if not unnatural, unacceptable.”
Marcus looked up, and met Hodgkiss’s gaze. He opened his mouth, and closed it again. Wittgenstein would not have known how to describe the colour of his hair or eyes, they were no colour. Give me a sign, thought Vincent Hodgkiss, feeling beads of sweat form on his own collar-bone, in his own groin. A man must wish to poison a relation before it starts, to embark upon it with such a fatal tale.
“The law has changed,” said Marcus. He moved very slightly away from Hodgkiss.
“I’m sorry,” said Hodgkiss, the ordinary-language man.
“There’s no need,” said Marcus, polite and quick. He said “Think of the complexity of the patterning in feathers, what with iridescence, and hooks and eyes, and patterns that are only made by the overlapping of many single feathers on one birdtail ...”
“More shandy?”
“I don’t think so.”
It was a spring day. Not on the dark high moor, but visible in the pink haze of buds on the silver birches and a spice of green on the dark thorns, and the first white flowers on the blackthorn in the woodland lower in the valley. Watchers in the farmyard saw the striding figure on the ridge, black with a solid core, surrounded by flapping movement in the wind. The head was up, a black disc on a blue sky, and the arms were flung wide from time to time, like a scarecrow, one thought, like a priest greeting the sun, another thought. Black sliding shapes rushed out from the whirling skirts, circled, and were apparently reabsorbed. Black crows went over, flapping strongly. The figure whirled and waved at the head of the Dun Vale path, and then dipped into the path itself, and became invisible.
The woods, still sooty-bare for the most part, were full of dead leaves, dead bracken, through which new shoots pushed, Lords and Ladies, hoods tightly folded, grey bluebells, a few windflowers. The undergrowth was full of crashing and hissing. Creatures rattled and scattered. They were semi-wild hens, their plumage dusty, their necks, once pecked naked and bleeding in the batteries, now soft with resurgent down. If the creatures were descended from jungle fowl, the ancestral jungles must contain no natural enemies, for their scaly feet and their jumps of alarum or clumsiness, made a revealing racket. Indeed, there were bones and claws and scattered pluckings on the path, showing that many had been killed and—at least partly—eaten. They clucked and chuckled and peered with nervous yellow-rimmed eyes out of the brushwood. The two dogs made little snapping sallies at them, but were themselves fat and easily winded. “Shoo, shoo,” cried Lady Wijnnobel, with contempt. She stomped through a flurry of golden chicks. Further into the thicket a turkey gobbled, and raised his blue-green shining tail. Odin and Frigg backed off. When they came to the end of the path they found their way barred by marching white geese, heads high, long coiling necks full of dangerous muscle, crowding and hissing. Lady Wijnnobel stopped, and said “Shoo” with less conviction. Clemency Farrar and Paul-Zag appeared out of the house, and Clemency threw grain to the geese, placating them with murmurs.
“They are the traditional guardians.”
“You are vestals?” Lady Wijnnobel enquired, unsmiling.
“Not exactly. We are a community.”
“I know who you are. I have come.”
The sentence should have had an end. I have come to visit. I have come to learn. It stood truncated.
“Do you think you could—call the dogs, put them on a lead, they’re upsetting the ducks and pigeons.”
“They don’t require physical control. They respond to command. Odin, Frigg, do not worry the birds. Come here.”
They came, prostrating themselves, grinning their dog grins, their hairy bellies in the mud.
“Can I help you?” asked Clemency, in her vicarage manner.
“I am told you welcome all seekers. I am an astrologer.”
“A powerful one,” said Paul-Zag. “I’ve seen you performing.”
“I do not perform. I communicate. I instruct.”
“I know. I said the wrong thing. I perform there. It’s my way, performing.”
“I have seen you.”
“Tea,” said Clemency. “Please come in, all are welcome, I’ll make tea.”
Odin and Frigg scared a whole, shimmering flock of pigeons into the air, and a duck with dishevelled neck-feathers into the midden. Lady Wijnnobel’s brows set together, and Clemency thought better of what she had been going to say. She bowed her head under the low door, and went into Dun Vale Hall.
Chapter 20
From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell
Many thanks for facilitating the release of Joshua Ramsden, alias Josh Lamb, and Lucy Nighby. Release seems the wrong word, since one is the owner, and the other the centre, of the extraordinary world in which I find myself. People in our profession do not expect things to go well, and do not always know what to do with—how shall I describe it? It isn’t ecstasy, or bliss, though it has things in common with the acid experiences I have shared with Zag. It is a sense of hope, and well-being. And carries with it, since I am a cynical old soul-doctor from the unregenerate outer darkness, the fear that like all happiness, it is in its very nature brief. We have all prayed earnestly in our different ways to be transfigured, and now we are shimmering on the edge of transfiguration, it is frightening. For what does a transfigured soul do, in space and time? How do we pass our infinite days? We are not there yet, for which I am grateful, for I am not ready. My fingers still reek of tobacco, my arm-pits and my groin have their usual animal stink, I am not perfect. Indeed, I find myself praying like St. Augustine, Lord make me good, but not yet. Not yet. I am afraid of the light I glimpse as a man may be afraid of spending his seed in an infinitely delayed orgasm. What then? What then? There was a poem by Donne I used to use with my so-called “patients” (and patient many of them had to be, I see now, from this rim of the world). Do you know it? It is called “A Lecture upon the Shadow.” (Yet another example of how this resolute Freudian is being sucked inexorably into the world of C. G. Jung.) It describes a machinery of affective relations which mimics the orgasmic mounting I’ve just mentioned.
Love is a growing or full constant light
And his first minute, after noon, is night.
There are the Manichaean opposites. Light. Night. We are all moving towards the Light. But when we reach it, shall we be extinguished in a puff of smoke? It sometimes feels probable.
Maybe, on the other hand, we shall reach a state, or stage, where living in the full glare of enlightenment becomes tolerable and even necessary. It’s hard to describe the early symptoms. One is a sense I think we all have—some intermittently, some all the time—that we are not separate creatures, but one Being. The Quakers were already prepared for that, with their Sense of the Meeting. We drop our walls, we extend beyond our skins, we move in beautiful synchrony, whether we work, or sing, or dance, o
r listen, or sit in lucid silence. I knew if I tried to put it into words I should strike a false note. It is so. The other symptom I’ve noticed—and many of us have remarked on—is that we experience ordinary things as transfigured. How can I tell you? I lay the breakfast table, when it is my turn, and the forms of the forks and spoons, the metal in the light, the bowls, the tines, strike me as subtle and perfect, as though I was a painter, maybe, taking apart the forms light makes of them and putting them together again—seen in the light—as infinitely surprising. I am shocked by the surface of a broken bread roll, the grains, the crevices, the softness, the way my tongue sees the satisfactory taste. Looking out of the window is an unbearable revelation. The loveliness of the uneven glass, a bubble, a streak of rainwater, the rushing of white birds in the farmyard, the dark line of the moor edge, the unbearable variety of the blues of the sky. I know the others feel like this, most of the time, if not all. We discuss it. Gideon Farrar and his wife make their ordinary feasts and all of us savour every mouthful as though we had been starving. Gideon, as is his nature, sees all the women transfigured, too. He speaks of the infinite beauty of the human form, and the ugly amongst us smile and carry their poor bodies more proudly.
And what, you will ask, as it is your duty to ask, about Joshua Ramsden? Charisma runs off him like a waterfall, it shines mildly from him like candle-light, it occasionally flares from him like sunlight. He walks about amongst us like a creature in a diving-bell of light under treacherous depths of murky water and forests of kelp. If you touch him—which he doesn’t like you to do—you get, I swear it, a minute electric shock. A prickle, a flicker. If it’s sex (which our Master would insist it must be) it’s diverted and also transfigured. He is very genuinely against sexual activity of any kind, like the Cathar Perfects and the Manichees before him. He’s an ascetic. He speaks often—in the talks he gives in the evenings—of withdrawal, of emptying out, of self-annihilation. Many religious leaders, I know, impose chastity on everyone else and are themselves the centre, the potent as opposed to the impotent, the begetter of all the children, the fulfilment of all desire. My old self says this untouchable quality he has is only a double turn of the screw—you want it more, to put it crudely, because you can’t have it. I have no idea whether he is conscious or unconscious of this—and I wouldn’t dare ask, which is interesting.