Sexing the Cherry (12 page)

Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular - an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

Outside of the rules of daily time, not to be is as exact as to be. We can't talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that it is infinite. So what the universe doesn't contain is as significant to us as what it does. There will be a moment (though of course it won't be a moment) when we will know (though knowing will no longer be separate from being) that we are a part of all we have met and that all we have met was already a part of us.

Until now religion has described it better than science, but now physics and metaphysics appear to be saying the same thing. The world is flat and round, is it not? We have dreams of moving back and forward in time, though to use the words back and forward is to make a nonsense of the dream, for it implies that time is linear, and if that were so there could be no movement, only a forward progression. But we do not move through time, time moves through us. I say this because our physical bodies have a natural decay span, they are one-use-only units that crumble around us. To everyone, this is a surprise. Although we see it in parents and our friends we are always amazed to see it in ourselves. The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I'. We feel it as absolutely part but not at all part of who we are. Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. And so we cannot move back and forth in time, but we can experience it in a different way. If all time is eternally present, there is no reason why we should not step out of one present into another.

The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, and that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end. When we say, 'I have been here before,' perhaps we mean, 'I am here now,' but in another life, another time, doing something else. Our lives could be stacked together like plates on a waiter's hand. Only the top one is showing, but the rest are there and by mistake we discover them.

Our inward life of pure time is sluggish or fast-flowing depending on our rate of conductivity. Just as certain metals and alloys when suitably cooled conduct electricity without generating any heat, and therefore without losing any of the energy they are carrying, so certain people may be superconductors for time. As well as experiencing time as we normally understand it, they may experience time as a larger, all encompassing dimension and so be in touch with much more than the present. Artists and gurus are, in the language of science, superconductors.

Our rate of conductivity is probably determined by an ability, learned or innate, to make the foreground into the background, so that the distractions of the everyday no longer take up our energy. Monks and contemplatives have tried to achieve this by withdrawing from the world - utter concentration, trance-like concentration, is what is needed. Passion, delirium, meditation, even out-of-body, are words we use to describe the heightened condition of superconductivity. It is certainly true that a criterion for true art, as opposed to its cunning counterfeit, is its ability to take us where the artist has been, to this other different place where we are free from the problems of gravity. When we are drawn into the art we are drawn out of ourselves. We are no longer bound by matter, matter has become what it is: empty space and light.

Empty space and light. For us, empty space is space empty of people. The sea blue-black at night, stretched on a curve under the curve of the sky, blue-black and pinned with silver stars that never need polish. The Arctic, where the white snow is the white of nothing and defies the focus of the eye. Forests and rain forests and waterfalls that roar down the hollows of rocks. Deserts like a burning fire. Paintings show us how light affects us, for to live in light is to live in time and not be conscious of it, except in the most obvious ways. Paintings are light caught and held like a genie in a jar. The energy is trapped for ever, concentrated, unable to disperse.

Still life is dancing life. The dancing life of light.

PAINTINGS I: 'A Hunt in a Forest'. A forest at night. Men in coloured tunics are riding fierce horses. Dogs bark. Disappearing distance into distance into distance the riders get smaller and vanish. Uccello. The coming of perspective.

When I saw this painting I began by concentrating on the foreground figures, and only by degrees did I notice the others, some so faint as to be hardly noticeable.

My own life is like this, or, I should say, my own lives. For the most part I can see only the most obvious detail, the present, my present. But sometimes, by a trick of the light, I can see more than that. I can see countless lives existing together and receding slowly into the trees.

TIME 4: Did my childhood happen? I must believe it did, but I don't have any proof. My mother says it did, but she is a fantasist, a liar and a murderer, though none of that would stop me loving her. I remember things, but I too am a fantasist and a liar, though I have not killed anyone yet.

There are others whom I could ask, but I would not count their word in a court of law. Can I count it in a more serious matter? I will have to assume that I had a childhood, but I cannot assume to have had the one I remember.

Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. I have heard people say we are shaped by our childhood. But which one?

I was walking around the island today when I found a deep pit full of worn-out ballet shoes. The satin was stained and the toes were scuffed through in holes. I followed the track which led from the pit up a short hill and along a ridge thick with blue stone. I soon came to a handsome house, quite out of keeping with the wild surroundings. I pulled on the doorbell but no one answered. Determined now to seek an end to my mystery, I climbed up the side of the house and managed to get in through a double window on the top floor. Inside, the rooms were wooden-floored and without furnishings, though each had a large fireplace and in each fireplace a cast of embers or a furious blaze warmed the room.

After some time I heard a sound like music, but not like any music I had heard, and I tracked the noise to a pair of doors which seemed to be bolted. Above the door was a glass pane, and by careful scrambling I was able to balance on the door knobs and peer into the room.

What I saw astonished me.

There appeared to be ten points of light spiralling in a line along the floor, and from these beings came the sound I had heard. It was harmonic but it had no tune. I could hardly bear to look at the light, and the tone, though far from unpleasant, hurt my ears. It was too rich, too strong, to be music.

Then I saw a young woman, darting in a figure of eight in between the lights and turning her hands through it as a potter turns clay on the wheel. At last she stood back, and one by one I watched the light form into a head and arms and legs. Slower and slower, the sound dying with the light, until on the floor were ten women, their shoes in holes, their bodies wet with sweat.

I fell off the door knobs.

When I came to I was in a much smaller room, propped in a chair on one side of the fire. Opposite me, attentive and smiling, was the woman I had first seen at dinner, what seemed like years ago and might have been days.

'My name is Jordan,' I said.

'My name is Fortunata,' she said. 'This is the first thing I saw. It was winter. The ground was hard and white. There were late roses in the hedges, wild and red, and the holly tree was dark green with blazing berries. It snowed every day, dense curtains of snow that wiped out the footprints coming to and from the house, leaving us to believe that no one ever came here or ever had. One day a robin landed on my windowsill and sank immediately. I dug it out with a teaspoon and it flew away, the snow falling like fetters from its wings. Because the snow was so deep it muffled the noise we made, and we crept about like a silent order, exchanging glances and surprising one another in the garden, where we moved in slow motion, each step shifting feet of snow like sand-dunes.

'As it grew colder and the snow hardened we carved statues from it, scenes from the Bible and the Greek heroes.

'It was the winter of our marriage, my sisters and I. We were to be married all together, all twelve of us on the same day. On New Year's Day, in blood-red dresses with our black hair.

'We decided to build a church in our garden. We built it out of the ice, and it cut our hands and the blood stained the snow like the wild red roses in the hedges. We worked without speaking, only pausing twice a day for meals and lighting up the dark with flares so that we could continue in spite of the shortness of the hours. It was finished the day before the ceremonies. The night before, our last night together as sisters, we slept as always in a long line of single beds beneath the white sheets and blankets like those who have fallen asleep in the snow. From this room, in the past, we had flown to a silver city that knew neither day nor night, and in that city we had danced for joy thinking nothing of the dawn where we lived.

'When it was dawn on our wedding day we dressed in our red dresses and unplaited our hair, and when we were ready we closed and locked the great windows that had been our means of escape and walked in single file from our bedroom down the marble staircase to the frozen church. We were married one by one under branches of mistletoe, but when it came to my turn, and I was the last, I looked at my husband to be, the youngest prince, who had followed us in secret and found us out, and I did not want him.

'At the last possible moment I pushed him aside and ran out of the church through the crowds of guests, mouths open like fishes.

'I took a boat and sailed round the world earning my living as a dancer. Eventually I came here and built this school. I never advertise. People find me because they want to, as you have.'

'I have met your sisters/ I said, and told her how they were all living together again in one place, and related the story of their various divorces.

'But the story they told me about you was not the same. That you escaped, yes, but that you flew away and walked on a wire stretched from the steeple of the church to the mast of a ship at anchor in the bay.'

She laughed. How could such a thing be possible?

'But,' I said, 'how could it be possible to fly every night from the window to an enchanted city when there are no such places?'

'Are there not such places?' she said, and I fell silent, not knowing how to answer.

LIES 8: It was not the first thing she saw, how could it have been? Nor was the night in the fog-covered field the first thing I saw. But before then we were like those who dream and pass through life as a series of shadows. And so what we have told you is true, although it is not.

Before the great snows and the fields of ice of which I have told you, my sisters and I flew through the window night after night and danced in a silver city of curious motion. The city itself danced. It had the sensation of being on board ship, of being heaved from corner to corner on top of the tossing tide.

To begin with no one in the city danced. They paid their taxes and brought up their children and ate and slept like the rest of this world. But that was when the city was also like the rest of this world and seemed to be still. Of course, some of the cleverer people knew that the world is endlessly in motion, but since they could not feel it they ignored it.

In the middle of summer, when the dying sun bled the blue sky orange, the movement began. At first it was no more than a tremor, then an upheaval, and everyone ran to put their silver in boxes and to tie up the dog.

During the night the shifting continued, and although no one was hurt the doctor of the place issued a written warning to the effect that anyone whose teeth were false should remove them in case of sudden choking. The prudent applied this to hairpieces and false limbs and soon the vaults of the town hall were filled with spare human matter.

As the weeks went by, and it became clear that the underground activity had neither ceased nor worsened, a few brave citizens tried to make the best of it and strung ropes from one point to another, as supports to allow them to go about their business. In time all of the people started to adjust to their new rolling circumstances and it was discovered that the best way to overcome the problem was to balance above it. The ropes were no longer used as supports but as walkways and roads, and everyone, even those who had piled up their limbs in the town hall, learned to be acrobats. Carrying coloured umbrellas to help them balance, they walked in soft shoes from their homes to their usual haunts.

A few generations passed, and no one remembered that the city had ever been like any other, or that the ground was a more habitual residence. Houses were built in the treetops and the birds, disgusted by this invasion of their privacy, swept even higher, cawing and chirping from the banks of clouds.