The Black Book (33 page)

“Come,” says old Tarquin, afraid to be left alone in the dimension he has begun to inhabit. “Come, share with me. We shall control the temporal world. We shall be monarchs of all we survey. Look. In this room I have the sum total of all human and esoteric knowledge, printed on paper. Need we ever stir outside to examine the apparent reality? The essential truth lies within us. Come.”

But already I am too concerned with the details of the journey even to answer him. I try sometimes to explain to him what I am feeling, but it is no good. “Why move?” he demands indignantly. “What is wrong with my intellectual attitude, sitting still in the Lotus pose? It is airtight, my dear.”

Well, incomprehensibly enough, I decide to go my own bloody way, whether he understands it or not. I have entered into the personality of the external things, and am sharing their influences. I skate along the borders of the daily trivialities like a ghost, observing but withholding myself from them. There are such things as the Banquet of the Sydenham Cycling Club, for example, which I would write about if I were less tired. There is Honeywoods and the vexed problem of the drainage. There is Marney talking about getting married; and a host of other data for which there is no room. There is Eustace, going down, as he says, “into the valley of the shadow” as his wife has her fourth. There are also the incest ceremonies in the Spice Islands, the five-foot negrito with the everted lips, and races dying out in Iceland because of pelvic rickets.… Above all there is the journey. It has become so real to me that I have developed a sort of evasiveness when refusing invitations. “If I am
here
”, I say, “on Tuesday I'd love to come.” Or, “Tuesday? Well, I may not …” Etc., etc. Very soon I shall have to take at least a week-end return to Cherbourg in order to satisfy my friends. Everyone inquires solicitously: “Let me see, you're going away, aren't you?” Or, “By the way, when did you say you were leaving?” I shall begin on the first fine day in spring. May will find me scudding southward under the trades, in the direction of the quest—perhaps in the wrong direction. There is only trial and error on a journey like this, and no signposts. The end is somewhere beyond even Ethiopia or Tibet: the land where God is a yellow man, an old philosopher brooding over his swanpan.

In the light of Sunday afternoon this must be read quaintly. On Sundays we have a nice matey card party in Hilda's room, at the bamboo table with three legs. The wireless is turned on full, and occasionally we get most beautifully incongruous things through it The Ninth Symphony, for example, or an aria for the toothbrush. No one is worried, not even Peters, who feels compelled to acknowledge art even if he has no taste for it. “Ah!” he will say cleverly, “Bach.” He is puzzled when we laugh at him. Imagine it. That stale room with the Ninth Symphony scratching away and Clare smoking his scented fags and polishing his fingernails; and the stuffed owls on the mantelpiece looking so damned critical and deprecating that one could weep with hysteria. Hilda in her scarlet flannel nightgown pouring weak tea for us and losing farthings at
vingt-et-un.
Or Lobo crossing himself over every natural he gets. I tell you it is a sort of picture for a Spanish almanac.

Upstairs, in the long room overlooking the Adriatic, where the tide blows up clean from Africa, you are lying. Your face is as clear as water. Softly posed in the moonlight like a forgotten desert you are lying, living and dying, lulled, systolic, diastolic motion, as the waves shiver their enormous spasms on the beach. What is poignant is this hour, this late waning moonlight, the Pleiades wheeling over your dramatic Sapphic, the enormous clouds, the surf, the monk shivering in his cell among the candles, the dolphins turning, and the face, the white face turned up blind to Africa like a pilgrim blind with dream. Nothing else. In this dead night under a dead Greek myth I tell you finally that it is not death. It is life in her wholeness from which one draws this terrible system of love, of creation, of loss. In Cyprus under the trees, Athens, Sicily, the same long purifying tides throw up their pure lotion across the statues, the robes, the eyes of the huddled philosophers who outfaced the truth. The churches are stiff with beards and candles, celebrating the dark mass of the spirit as it enters its absolute aloneness. In the cathedrals under the sea we tread the aisles of weeds, and listen for the long chime of bells, bubbled under the water for centuries, among the cargoes of grain and millet, raisins and fruit: argosies which are reckoned on no merchant's sheets. Cross over to Bethlehem. They will be able to tell you for certain whether something has been born from this discord of the elements, or whether the fiat has gone forth; whether this is a pre-nativity or a post-mortem!

Out of that void in which the dream lies, coiled and fatal as the dragon, I conjure these few pieces of religion above a body lying silent as death, and as spacious. Hushed, in a new temperature, as if under glass the single dark candle of the torso ended in little blunt pebbles, toes. Or hair like a soft bed of breathing charcoal laid about the islands, twisting up its coils in soft explosions on the beaches. Outside on the beach the old women are sweeping up the seaweed in a heavy wind. Can you hear what is said in the screaming of the olives, in the dramatic archery of the cypresses? Verminous, the top-hatted monks huddle to mass in Athos, going through the familiar litanies, without comfort. What does it mean, this language, this voice raised to the roof like a thick stump of sound, these vulgar armed candles? In England there is an old man who feeds the swans, slowly burning down, damp, rheumy, sour, into the hollow socket of his breast. The poets hymn his simplicity. What does this mean? If he were an old bun-nosed Tibetan feeding the wild swans under the Greek Islands, they would deplore the incongruity of the world.

Then there is that other moment when I come into the room just as the dawn is breaking. You are alive. There is a lot to say, but the morning is so reverent, the smoke on the bonfire lies about in parcels, the ice on the pond like an altar cloth, morning … The first long hush, like a breath drawn taut before the swimmer dives into the icy river. There are huge warm places in the field-grass where the cattle lay. Dew heavy. The black jersey still lying out over your left shoulder like a sofa on a green field. Dew heavy. The deep scent of the castle standing charred on the hill. There is much to be said, but no possible way of saying it. I can hear the ivy crawling on the walls. The sun is shining on the spoon, the toast, on your tongue. The chickens are going to market, very chilly and disgruntled. Someone is cutting wood for the fires. I am as nerveless as the morning sausages on the board. The knife slits, the sun strides up over the hill and we are able to talk again, slowly and without emphasis. Italy is mentioned. There are four gutted candles in the room. Yes, and the first edition of Baudelaire. Your voice starts queer responses in one: a bone in the groin, mastoid, the nerves of the throat, the fibres of the tibia. I cannot tell for certain, but I am bound to get a letter within a day of two. Let us walk quietly in the declension of the season, smoke a pipe over the gate, take note of how the asphodels are doing. In the little house run over the accounts, select a book, doze over the fire, or at bedtime light the candles and start the piano hymning. It is all the same, for this is a piece out of another book. It is significant merely because Tarquin is mentioned. Over the fire and the crusader's hearth, in the smoke of pipes, Tarquin is mentioned. It is a strange immortality to be consummated here, in this cottage, drowned in flowers, under the glimmering bottoms of the books. I record it now merely to reassure myself that we are never forgotten. There is always the strange consummation of memory taking place, over the whole world, the whole of time even, until the vocabularies in which you are created fall away and are renewed.

Between that submarine cottage and this fanatic Adriatic landscape, where the tides beat up carrying us away in the impetus of their struggle towards history, there is a gulf fixed. More vast, more unexplored than the Challenger Deep. In that gulf, dancing, as in a coloured shadow-show, are the figures I keep talking about. Their shadows lie across the paper. Yachts cross, and rolling caiques; occasionally a grey warship slides across the windows, but the shadows are constant. The dolphins idle all day in clumsy regiments, mixing into the picture, crowding it. Embassies from Minos and the litmus Cretan women, but we do not forget, we do not forget, we do not forget. In spite of the immense sea, steering up and down, attacking, feinting, wheeling its range of colours under the house which stands like a white ark on the black rock. Within the thirtieth parallels North and South of the Equator like a huge humming-bird ultramarine to the South of lat. 30. S. a deep swollen indigo. Under the terrible fires of the Antarctic Circle, a glib and fearful olive-green; always the old nurse, the Poseidon, cherishing her dead like a bear, washing through the imploded strongrooms of liners, breaking open the trunks of sailors, with a maniac love, cherishing. This is the element to which we shall be delivered up at the final moment, lulled, kneaded, softened and gushed. Smooth round shot, footfirst, parcelled in linen, shrived. Then with a long cool drop to drift down, adamant, to the planktonic organisms dither and skate, sprouting exotic eyes on floating stalks; where the sperm whales munch dredgefuls of cuttlefish and prowl like bardic Tennysons, muttering in their beards.

Come, I am always saying to Tarquin. There are still new universes to be inhabited, if you have the authentic disease and the courage. Come, drop down with me to the limits of the photic zone. Let us construct out of the sensitive bodies of this twilight race our new systems that we talk about all day long. Bathypelagic, myopic, optical, shall we dawdle away the aeons over this one problem, making a little personal propaganda as we go? At a hundred fathoms fish like silver bullets. Under the viscous scalp itself phenomena like Porpita and Ianthina, blue smoke in water. At three hundred rufous, brick, claret. The violet flesh of pteropods, wicked wicked, wicked. Here is a philosophic reality whose terminology is lying there, complete but unused. Come, you white-livered tapeworm, let us get busy. The problem is how to destroy the fatal passivity of the plankton, and give it the nektonic virtues; the ability to move with the time, and against tide. I am not concerned with the Benthos, the mud eaters, shit gobblers, and their brood. We must concentrate only on those who have a chance of being saved. (Hilda, the great sonsy whale, for instance. I have seen her dragged out on the beach and hacked open from chin to navel. Her belly so crammed with crustaceans that they put spades to work on her.) Hilda, one realizes, has fulfilled the primary law in her way. She has a baroque nobility because her gift is total. She lives with her great swollen dugs pressed out against time, in a perpetual delirium of service. And now, in the winter of our discontent, she has given up all she had to the poor. Watch her. She is sitting there calmly drinking tea, with one shoe off. Her nostrils are cut like ancient anchor ports of a ship. One expects at any moment that a length of hawser will clatter out of them and—splash!—anchor her in her own teacup. Indifferently clare clips his frayed cuffs with her scissors. And Peters sits lugubriously on the bed and wishes he were dead. Peters? A nicely clothed dummy fresh from school. The kind of waxwork that has given the English their reputation abroad. He has read all that the well-dressed man should read. His poise is superb with members of his own class. One has the idea that he could pick his nose with a cigar in his mouth and
still
look genteel, old cottage English, pure, bred on the bottle, etc. In the drab vertigo of Sunday afternoon we perform our motionless almanac together. We share with painted things the loss of personality, sitting here in this exotic gas-lit hothouse, among the owls and cosmetics. Hilda I know is not with us, but already entering that third ocean which has been prepared for her. Crossing the zodiac of the new universe alone, pioneer, adventurer, forerunner: from house to house, her great turbines shaking her free of the muddy littorals. Nosing down with that predatory beak of hers deeper and deeper, across the fucoid belt, the laminarian, the zosteran belt toward the absyssal deep which is marked on no card. Yes, beyond the territory of those remote tribes we only live in illuminated names: the pycnogonida, the nudibranchia, the brittlestars, the chitons, the crinoids, and the pennatulids—away beyond these into that region from which we are going to receive the new myth.

Attempt it, I am always saying to that sallow bastard,
attempt it.
There is nothing to lose. All the hope in the world is here, between my legs, between the joints of my fingers, in the eye, the liver, the reins. Attempt it and become the symbol of failure, but only make the attempt. It is useless. He has not even the courage of Gregory's death: that quaint suicide. Gregory who shot himself dead with the green pen. In this mythology, so fragmentary, with so many drops of feeling and expression, Gregory is almost a complete symbol. It was a gallant suicide. But Tarquin? He moulders away visibly, nerveless, blanched, waxen, into a kind of pus-drunk senility of his own. The stench that goes up from that decomposing cranium these days! I am forced to stand near an open window to speak to him. He is the living symbol of Mr. Valdemar, galvanically twitching in a sort of creaky life of his own. What is he, what are we all? I cannot tell with any clarity. Sometimes I puzzle over these pages, trying to work out for them this riddle of personality, but I am always too much inside them to see clearly. I am afraid, also, to inquire too closely into my own symbol here, alongside all these, because it seems foreign to me. A little frightening. What am I doing with this noisy machine and these sheets of linen paper? It is a kind of trap from which I cannot escape, not even by shooting myself dead with words as Gregory did, or said he did. When I think this I am too afraid to continue writing. There is an iron bar pressing down behind my eyes. A sensation of some filament in the brain, some fibre, some internal fuse wire, strained to breaking point. I am afraid it will snap and blind me. It is then that I get up in a panic and go to where you are sitting, working, and knitting, and put my hands on your hands. Then in a moment or two my courage is restored and I return to the pages, turning them over, reading them slowly, wondering: I am back in that menagerie again, shouting at Tarquin or following Hilda in her immense voyages from crater to crater of the Atlantic, gorging crustaceans. With Lobo rolling in the ditch on top of the blond shopgirl, he squeaking in copulation like a frog. Or listening to Chamberlain reading me the sonnets, and sniffing like a schoolgirl. Or Perez cherishing his clubbed penis, and handing it casually to Hilda, as one might give up one's ticket at the terminus. Without a sigh or a word handing up his ticket and entering the cathedral on his knees. Or Connie impaled in her own dirty sheets, wriggling and pissing until the blood runs into her boots, and her eyes are as expressionless as handbags. It is all there, going round and round forever like a great Rabelaisian merry-go-round, faces flaring out at me.