Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (24 page)

‘What happened to the buttons in the end?’

‘They were sent to the Queen of the Witches for purification, and afterwards beaten out into a gold sheet for the archives. However, the finder was allowed to keep the snuff-box, which was judged to be a work of love.’

‘And why have you brought me to this hut? I can’t paint, and you’re no magician.’

‘I’m hoping that Sapphire will come here.’

‘Very well, tell me about her.’

‘But first, if you’ll excuse me, a little about myself. Or do you want to ask me something before I begin?’

‘Yes; I’d like you to put your hand on this locket and swear that you’re the Interpreter’s colleague Quant, and not just another of those annoying illusions that have fooled me these last few days. Your English is so correct and idiomatic that I’m a little suspicious of you.’

He smiled and took the oath in New Cretan.

‘Did
She
give you that?’ he asked, greatly impressed by the locket.

I nodded. ‘In the alder-grove,’ I said.

‘Did she seem pleased with you?’

‘She was good enough to tell me that I was doing very well.’

‘You’re a lucky man. Now, listen and interrupt me whenever you like. First about myself. I’m what they call a
margoton
here: so far as I know there’s no English equivalent. It means someone who, though a reputable member of one estate, has the capacity of belonging to another. We margotons are extremely rare, but the poet Vives was one of us, and that provides the necessary precedent. He was born in the magicians’ estate, but at the time of the Cyprian Flood, when all the captains of his district lost their lives, he assumed command and carried on the rescue work to everyone’s admiration. “Thereafter Vives rode a skewbald,” the
Brief History
says. I was born in the magicians’ estate but had all the earmarks of a recorder, except a temperamental incapacity for croquet, which I have never been able to overcome; then when I had already been initiated as a recorder, at the same time as my sister, I suddenly discovered that I was also a poet. I debated with myself whether I ought to ask for a transfer to my original estate; but decided that I was as much recorder as I was poet, so that there could be no advantage in changing. Besides, when I came to specialize in English – a language, I find, which can’t be read without poetic intuition – I realized that the time had passed when it was possible to write true poetry in my own language… I think Mallet-head mentioned our recent find – the Liverpool hoard of Christmas-cards?’

‘He did; it was about the first thing I was told after my evocation.’

‘Adventurers found the box in a cave. I gave him the task of transcribing the texts before they were destroyed – all paper has to be destroyed when the year ends. In the same collection was a manuscript book of poetry which I intended to transcribe myself. When I deciphered the poems – the ink was badly faded in places – I found that they had far greater bite and poignancy than any of those included in our English Canon; but I realized at the same time that their inclusion would have had a disruptive effect on New Cretan thought. The book had two names on the fly-leaf – your own and Erica Turner’s.’

‘It had a speckled cover, hadn’t it?’

‘No, the cover was missing.’

‘Well, anyhow, I remember it well.’ (How the hell did it get to Liverpool? – that must have been long after my time. I bought it in Algiers when I was there with Erica in 1932. I had brought my books with me and one day, after we’d had an argument about poetic integrity, she challenged me to copy out all the English poems I knew in which the poet had really come clean about himself without holding anything back. There weren’t very many, I found. But even so, Erica was scathing about my choice. She said: ‘There’s not a man among them who’d have died twice running for the same woman.’ I asked her: ‘Why twice?’ ‘Once is no proof of integrity,’ she said. Erica was a queer girl.)

‘I didn’t show them to Mallet-head or anyone else, but I began to write English poetry myself. Since English is a dead language and my poems were not intended for anyone’s eye, I could see no harm in this. At any rate, it solved my personal problem as a margoton, and I was pleased that I hadn’t changed my estate again: as a magician I would have been obliged to write in New Cretan and hand my poems around. Then one day the Goddess came to talk to me about you.’

‘Look here, Quant! You’re now in the position of being able to think and talk in terms of my age as well as of your own: no other man in New Crete can do that. So you owe me a commonsense explanation of what you mean, when you say: “The Goddess came to talk to me.”’

‘But you’ve had the same experience yourself. She gave you that locket in the alder-grove.’

‘Experience isn’t the same as explanation. I took the Hag for a representative of the Goddess, not the Goddess herself.’

‘That’s a distinction without a difference. She always assumes the form of a living creature. Do you happen to know the
Iliad
, one of the myths of the ancient world?’

‘I do, as a matter of fact: I read it in Greek at school.’

‘Then perhaps you’ll remember that the Goddess – there’s really only one Goddess, not several – sometimes appeared in human disguise during the Trojan War, and even on one occasion as a man: as the Trojan Prince Deiphobus, just before Hector’s fight with the Greek champion?’

‘With all respect to Homer, it never occurred to me to take the story literally.’

‘You would have done if you’d served in the Trojan War.’

‘That’s possible. Go on.’

‘Well, you’ll admit that it isn’t natural for you to worship a Father-god?’

‘Wait a moment, that’s a rather sweeping statement. It came naturally enough to my father, for instance.’

‘Indeed, and was he a happy man?’

‘When he wasn’t worrying about his soul or his accounts.’

‘Yes, what I mean is that the Father-god isn’t in the blood like the Goddess; he’s an artificial concept which your ancestors have done their best to naturalize, but you should have abandoned him long ago in the interests of sanity. Your chief trouble in the Late Christian epoch is unlimited scientific war which nobody likes but everybody accepts as inevitable; that’s a typical by-product of God-worship. In the archaic days, whenever tribal life grew too monotonous the Goddess used, of course, to allow her peoples to go to war; but she kept it within decent bounds, though not perhaps as strictly as now. When your ancestors rebelled against her they invented a Father-god whose sole business was war – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and all – a ferocious demon who stole her battle axe and set out to conquer mankind. He ousted the Goddess from sovereignty, made her his bond-woman, and eventually announced that she no longer existed.’

‘If she’s as powerful as you New Cretans believe, I wonder she submitted to that.’

‘She not only submitted to it, she arranged it. You see, a few millennia of chaos can mean very little to an immortal, and she had two objects clearly in mind. The first was that she loved man and didn’t want him to feel fettered and repressed: she would emancipate him and allow him to fulfil his destiny (as she ironically expressed it) by letting him find out the absurdity of creating a supreme deity in his own phallic likeness. In the end he would voluntarily return to her rule. Her second object was to demonstrate the existence in him of certain intellectual capacities hitherto unsuspected by woman: woman was taking her sexual superiority too much for granted and treating him as a plaything.’

‘In theory it seems to me as natural to worship a male God as a Goddess.’

‘Exactly: she had to grant man the power to theorize and that was one of his theories. But in practice a male deity is a contradiction in terms. Presently your ancestors lost all faith in the Father-god’s wisdom and justice, and even began to doubt his existence; a few secretly returned to Goddess worship. But others turned rationalist and created a God of Reason and Learning as a substitute for the Goddess of Love and Wisdom.’

‘To what point in history does that bring the story?’

‘To the time of Socrates and Aristotle. You may already know the lines:

Socrates and his demon
Made insurrection…

I’ll give you them later, if you don’t. The War-god still maintained his sovereignty and since love had ended between man and man – except in the secret fraternities still sponsored by the Goddess – he also became the God of Robbers. The third place in the Rogue Trinity was taken by the God of Money, whom we call Dobeis.’

‘You seem to be by-passing Christianity.’

‘It’s not important, except as a symptom of man’s spiritual fever: it brought diversion, rather than change. Christianity grew out of the fore-doomed attempt of a few Jewish sages to regularize and purify the worship of the Father-god by a complete suppression of Goddess-worship; they anathematized the God of Money and identified the Father-god with supreme Love, Wisdom and Justice. But the sages were soon shouldered aside by Gentile converts to Christianity, which came to comprise all sorts of contradictory beliefs – everything, from a perverse philosophical theory of not-being, and a half-hearted cult of the Goddess as a chaste Virgin, to pure War-god worship. By your epoch, the Rogue Trinity was supreme in every practical sense. There’s a famous verse passage in our
Myths of New Crete
:

“The sword decides,” rumbled the God of Robbers;
“Science is Truth,” the God of Reason piped;
“And each man has his price,” chanted Dobeis;
“All else is superstition,” roared the Rogues.
Nimuë heard their chorus…

It seems to me that a Late Christian poet was committed in the name of integrity to resist, doubt, scoff, destroy and play the fool; it was only when he met with a like-minded fellow-poet, or with a woman on whom the spirit of the Goddess had secretly descended, that he felt all was not yet lost. Is that right?’

‘More or less.’

‘Mallet-head has told you of the origins of New Crete. When the Sophocrats came to power at a time of almost universal despair, they were persuaded by ben-Yeshu’s arguments to plant the colonies from which our present social system has developed. The Anthropological Council accepted the contention with which ben-Yeshu’s famous, though heavy-handed, book opened: “Civilization has suffered a global
crise des nerfs
resultant on an attempt to eradicate a vital religious element from the psychological inheritance of the dominant Alpine blood-group.” In other words, they agreed that, if mankind were to survive at all, the Goddess must be re-instated in power, and they had collected sufficient archaeological data to be able to restore her worship in convincing detail.’

He paused and drew three stars in the air with his finger, to show that he had finished his historical introduction.

‘So now you’re back again in pre-Trojan War times,’ I said, ‘but with the advantage that man has learned the danger of rebelling against the Goddess; and that in the course of his rebellion he’s made a number of useful inventions from which you still benefit.’

‘That’s the credit side of the balance sheet: “For here five-fingered custom rules us well,” as Solero put it; but there’s also the debit side, which I was able to assess only after reading your manuscript book. I realized then that ever since the last three abortive attempts to overthrow the New Cretan system from outside – there’s never been an internal revolt – we have lived what your age in idealistic prospect, called “the good life”, and that is a very easy life indeed. I don’t mean that we haven’t worked hard and played hard, kept in good physical and spiritual health, fought our one-day wars with enthusiasm, and gone for occasional adventures in the Bad Lands. But somehow that’s not enough.’

‘Did you ever come across Bernard de Mandeville’s
Grumbling Hive
? Ben-Yeshu seems to have overlooked that in his list of Utopias.’

‘No, it hasn’t survived.’

‘Well, it’s pretty much to the point. He held that virtue – which he defined as every performance by which man, contrary to the impulse of nature, tries to benefit his fellowman out of a rational desire for goodness – is in the long run detrimental to mankind. He describes a society possessed of all the virtues which falls into apathy and paralysis, and insists that private vices are public benefits.’

‘That, of course, was an over-statement of the case, an invitation to chaos. But it’s true at least that the thrilling intensity of the love that your poets felt for the Goddess in the Late Christian epoch can have no equivalent as things are now. When Cleopatra wrote her poems the issue here was still in doubt; the old civilization still existed side by side with the new, and our traders were still sailing to Corinth and bringing back doubtful merchandise. Cleopatra’s poems are a passionate plea not to relapse into humanity’s former madness. But ever since the days of Solero and Vives and our other legislative poets, what have we to show? There’s Robnet, who lived a good deal later, but he was brought here as a child from the American Bad Lands and kept something of his natural wildness until his death; and he died young. Who else is there?’

‘The other night at the Santrepod, Erica Turner came into the room – well, you know about Erica.’

He nodded. ‘But I haven’t yet heard this part of the story.’

‘Sapphire had played something by Alysin; I found it insincere and told Erica so. She took the same line as you do: that since the days of Cleopatra music and poetry have gone into a decline.’

‘And what did Sapphire and Sally say to that?’

‘Nothing. They were asleep. Everyone but myself was asleep when Erica defied the spell they had laid against her and walked in.’

‘She was the Goddess,’ Quant said.

‘I had suspected that. “She will be old and young whenas she pleases.” But it’s difficult for me, brought up in the theory of a God who is a supernatural being of dazzling brightness, portentous size and thunderous voice, to be awed by a Goddess who can appear in the likeness of Erica Turner.’

‘She wasn’t trying to awe you,’ said Quant, ‘any more than Athene was trying to awe Hector. And would you really be awed by a celestial giant with a voice like thunder? I can’t believe you’re that sort of man, Mr Venn-Thomas.’