The Black Book (25 page)

The air I breathe is pure and sterile, and reminiscent of a tube station. I am fed through the wall, in which lies a sort of filter, embedded. Once every two hours there is a gush of synthetic food which passes into me without my realizing it. I am happy because I am nothing, an idea which is a little difficult to express. This little plush world imposes a routine on me which I respect. I am fanatically regular. Between meals I sit and brood. Somehow the books are no longer interesting, because I am forgetting how to read. I sit with my hands over my eyes and feel the waves passing in my body. What they say I cannot as yet tell. It is a language totally unfamiliar, which runs along a dimension of sensibility I have not hitherto cultivated. Sometimes I take a little stroll up and down the chamber, repeating my own name to myself. The absolute deadness of the lithographs on the walls no longer depresses me. I have got beyond revolution, that is to say, beyond God. For a moment there was an obstinate nerve in my breast telling me to take the ice axe and smash my way through the red wall, but I resisted it. I am so happy in my weakness really. I do not even regret Pater. My glyptic jailors wait stiffly for me to address them in their own language. I must hurry up and learn the grammar of waves, the curious syntax which passes between them like a current. There is a supreme logic behind this life which I can sense but cannot understand. Concentrate, then, I must concentrate. If I did not feel I was being stifled the whole time, it would be easier.

As for the whale, the exterior universe which was Hilda (the name now lichenized, sponged, scurfed, dimmed), God knows where she spins, in what logarithmic water, over the Poles, her great flukes flashing blue, reaching up almost to the moon. God knows what deep-water fungus grows between her fins, what ice drums on the outside walls of my prison. Jonah, I say to myself, quietly, persistently. It is the only word left over from the dead vocabularies. The only sound which I dare use in this red balloon, where I am inhabited by space. It has become my JAH. On the strange numen of this sound, left over from drowned languages, I shall shape the contemplative myth. The nucleus, myself. Give it time and it will become lichenized over with fables, crusted in jewels and parables, fossilized, filtered, crushed, bathed in spores, made more vegetable than empires, snowed under with divinities, Konx Ompax. Never ask me the precise latitude and longitude of heaven. It is as remote as the great rolling whale, whatever ocean she crosses. There is no language, not even the new spatial language, which can do justice to loneliness. To the remote Jonah, shut in this furnished bladder, blinded away from continent to yellow continent, across maps as yellow as coin, deltas, swamps, green belts of fertility.

I sit here, secure in the interpretation of the phenomenal world about me, fed at regular times, absently picking matter to pieces. I have a book in my hands, but I do not know what it is any more. There is nothing but this red mist rising from my ankles and choking me. Very occasionally it seems that I can hear fugitive noises of the old world, real or imaginary I do not ask. There is no reality. Only phenomena. I give them up to you as they occur: drumbeats, the rouged faces of dolls, my lover bleeding at the mouth, a toy pistol, fireworks, the abrupt goat face of Pan squealing in a red mist, a packet of french letters, a dustbin, dog's blood, newts, roasted carvings, fly-buttons, musk, lilies, the logos. Phenomena in a mist of vaporized blood. At times it seems that the red walls are moving outwards, becoming larger and larger. I have no sensation of change, however, of becoming. Only the dead full weight of
being
, of IS! No doubt somewhere in the arctic the black whale, Hilda, curves and plays, steaming at the moist nostrils, with a passion-flower at each ear.

This must be the end, the terminus. I am waiting for ever in space. It is time that kills one. Space is more durable than logic can suggest. If I thought I were going to be born again I should begin to whimper, to pout; imagine leaving this plush-lined niche in the forever. Another world? Don't be ridiculous. As the foetus is reported to have said: “I have been here so long I've sort of got attached to the old place.” Konx Ompax. The less said about it, the better. If I were to try and translate this existence into terms more easily understood, I might say that this happiness, in which I am nothing, is simply the turning-off of being: the entering-into of IS! An equation which cannot really be rendered, even by Arabian figures. Enough to tell you that it is from this springboard that I must make the final dive into divinity, hell-high, with my body prepared to ride time as gaily as a cork.…

The whale blinds away across the charts, covering them with a flick of the tail, and the little Jonah sits locked in his cabin with never even a porthole through which he could distract himself with imaginary worlds. By now, of course, I am blinded with blood. My only entertainment is in softly walking round the walls, repeating my own name, and chuckling quietly. I am happy. Such great thoughts pass through the chewing gum in my cranium that I long to perpetuate them, but there is not a scrap of paper. With my knife I carve a few of them on the walls, but it is tiring work. My boots are full of blood. The final image of the pre-spatial world has passed before me and gone. That was last Wednesday—yes, the solid Wednesday of the new Zodiac. It was the heraldic vision of Miss Smith playing on the musical sponge, while to the right of her a sunlit man was pissing a solid stream of gold coins against a wall. Symptomatic of disintegration? ? ? And why the hell not? The last nerve in my body has been touched. I have given in, folded up. In thy orisons may my sins remembered be. Perhaps somewhere the whale will come up with a mouthful of chewed liners, water-lilies, crowns, octopods, grand pianos, and pincushions. Who knows?

But the less said about
that,
the better. Konx Ompax. Mum's the word and I duck under.

 

*
   This is the recurrent regression motif with which everything seems to end: another back-to-the-womber's allegory.

BOOK THREE

T
he great question, then, is action, the perfection of one's actions. This is the problem which gnaws at us in these long winter moonlights: a problem under which the personality struggles, and sometimes seems to flower; to take on distortions, shadows, printed negatives of the flux outside. In myself I am not total. There are so many chinks in the steel that the outer shapes of things intrude, eat in among the orifices like rust. It is the endless duel with one's anonymity that weakens one. See what Gregory says:

Here begins an extract from Gregory's diary:

My imagination has become a vast lumber room of ideas. There is no dogma which does not find an echo from myself. I admit all of them. There is no necessity to move because I cannot escape. I sit here by the fire with a book open on my lap and the wireless turned on full, and try to establish my identity—that myth which is supposed to exist behind the scuffle of words in my brain. This green diary, which began as a sort of pawky literary fanfaronade, has taken a sudden upcurve on to the graph of emotion. It has become necessary to me. De Profundis, etc. etc. But I do not believe in God. I have endured many imaginary things, sitting here with my little book, alone, and afraid of making a fool of myself. I have written hundreds of tragic parts which I shall never be able to act. I shall never express anything. Pity me, I was born dumb. Death, the most gracious playwright of emotional scenes, has failed to devise even a walk-on which I am not too nervous to play. Laugh if you want. Since she died I cannot bear the darkness. I cannot bear the eternal self-examination of my actions. I cannot bear the moon's intrusion, wandering like an empty skull and afflicting me with the consciousness of self. Myself, that loathsome guest which I carry on my back, like the old man of the sea. You see, there is not, has never been, and never will be, one morsel of spontaneity in me. My actions are not determined by the wind, by the thunder, by any natural selfless spirit, but by that locomotive apparatus which I carry in a tin box under my waistcoat. I am an insect. Tonight I undressed before the mirror and examined my body very carefully, with a loathing that I am incapable of communicating to the paper. The ribs hanging there like a bagpipe! The small legs, slightly bowed; the flaccid dugs, the belly, the breastbone! I am infinitely outmoded, infinitely secondhand. A secondhand piano in the Caledonian Market could give my teeth points. As for the image of the eyes, under their arrows, what an aquarium of fishy reproaches!

Destiny has been altered by her death. Yet she is not the figure I am afflicted with on these winter nights. It is always myself I lament, my own death for which I mourn. I think of her as the addict thinks of his drug. Perhaps Gracie was the one spontaneous action in my life. Flawed, yes. Criss-crossed, eroded, but an action in itself. Are we, then, so precise? Let me use a phrase that even the critics will understand. Gracie, then, took me out of myself. In her, within her own ignorance, I created for myself almost a new personality. I was convalescent. “One would 'ardly know you since I come along,” she remarked once. “You used to be so shy like, Gregory. Not like the same man you aren't.” I was unaware that there should be this, the final attrition of being.

I have looked inwards at last, honestly, as I have never done before, as I shall never do again. I looked inwards, as Epictetus directs, to see the warm light of my own genius, to be satisfied by it, filled. But all I can discover is these strange figures of grief, this masque of the lost Gregories, which live out their submarine life behind the watery blue eyes in the mirror. There is no audit at the end of time which can ruin me any more. I have drawn a stroke across the paper. It is finished. An autonomy was supposed to exist in me. I petted myself with the idea, I fattened myself with it. Under the interrogation of the moon and the hot jazz I have been forced to admit that it was all faked. There is nothing in there to speak up for me. Only these strange figures of grief which parade across the paper under the squeaky nib of a fountain pen. “Nourish your grief,” said Chamberlain. “It is good to be broken down, made defenceless. Let the tears out if they want to come.” I am cork. A bundle of hysterical wires sitting here. Do not make me repeat again that it is not primarily she I mourn. My disease is egocentric, and therefore mortal. I am lamenting that perfect action which I shall never have time to do. I was born tongue-tied, you see.

Last night as I walked the corridors of the hotel I came across a door which was ajar. Stuck to it, white and altogether bony, was a hand with a wedding ring on it.

This impersonal cipher reminded me at once of my marriage to Grace—the fantastic quixotry of the idea. “Do you reely mean it, mate?” she asked me with that curious quick breathing she had when she was surprised. The answer to the question which you are about to put to me is simply, pride. I realized that, staring at the eroded yellow circle of gold last night. My friend Tarquin had said to me with a snigger: “You're losing your reputation, my dear. Living with a tart quite openly here. It's all over the hotel.” I knew then that the game was up. England is the one country where the word “freedom” is used without cynicism. By statute one is free. By opinion one is treated like a cretin. In a place like the Regina there is no law, only opinion. I give you the picture of Mrs. Juniper complaining to the manageress on an autumn afternoon. Such a shame you could not meet the lady. A virginity of brass which handcuffed her military husband and kept him down for twenty years in the wilds of India. Since he died her only interest in life, in the felicitous phrase of Chamberlain's wife, has been to twist the knackers of everyone in sight. She nearly twisted mine.

Tarquin came down with the news one night, and listening to his account of the faction which was ranged against us, I was surprised at my own fantastic rage. Even lice, after all, do not prey upon one another. A petition had been drafted and circulated with the names left blank. My sins were so well known and of such weight that it was impossible for one not to know at once to whom the paper referred.

Tarquin had been approached for his signature and had supplied it—a fact for which he felt a little guilty. Chamberlain did what he could to help. This consisted in bursting into the lounge after dinner and saying in his most indignant tones: “I've just heard about this scandalous business and I'm disgusted at the cheap behaviour of all you old bitches. What you need, Mrs. Juniper, is a papal bull.” Naturally, this was more a hindrance than a help. His wife was insulted in the street by Mrs. Felix, who was quite clear about whose side Jesus was on in this fray. Added to this was the anxiety that Gracie would have another attack and have to go to bed for a while. Tarquin heard Mrs. Robbins announcing to the lounge that Gracie had a nameless disease. All this, of course, one bore with phlegm. Even when the doctor said he could not attend her again for fear of losing a lucrative source of practice, I could find nothing withering to say. I had become granite. Gracie herself burst into tears, put her tail between her legs, and said that she must either leave me or we must both move. It was exactly this point that screwed down the lid properly. I will not be interfered with. I will not be touched by the unclean. I will not. In the kind of mood in which murder is so easily committed I told her she must marry me. It was then she remarked, “Do you reely mean it, mate?”