Astonishing the Gods (6 page)

In the city everything remembers, and freely yields its memories like certain flowers in moonlight.

A delighted mood blossomed in him as he passed the glittering arcades and marketplaces where the Invisibles from all over the world came to buy and sell ideas. Here they traded in philosophies, inspirations, intuitions, prophecies, paradoxes, riddles, enigmas, visions, and dreams. Enigmas were their trinkets, philosophies their jewelleries, paradoxes their silver, clarity their measure, inspiration their gold, prophecy their language, vision their play, and dreams their standard.

The season's fashion was for paradoxes, and the marketplace, even at night, was abuzz with fresh-minted paradoxes and ancient riddles from the farthest corners of the world. The air was scented with them. Enigmas twinkled over the arcade roofs, with shining eyes, like owls at play. Paradoxes flew about in the emporiums, like birds of joy. Riddles danced in the dark places, like blissful fireflies. Beautiful lights thrilled in his spirit. He quivered in a sparkling sense of a renewed childhood. For the first time since his arrival, he smiled.

He had passed the marts and the marketplaces of ideas, and was still smiling, when he saw an elongated glow in the distance moving towards him. Because of the glow he noticed the peculiarly ancient and velvet quality of the night.

The air was very warm and it smelt of old stones. It smelt also of marble, of the serenity that comes after centuries of turbulence, and curiously, also, of fragrant earth. He sensed that a divine mother ruled the night of the city. Her warm presence was both protective and enduring.

He seemed to float through the warm air. Thrilling to the melody of enigmas, he was nonetheless troubled by the approaching glow. It was like an omen. As the glow in the distance came closer he was able to distinguish four shining lamps in the air, moving without support, borne aloft and floating along with a stately majesty. There was something ceremonial about the way the lamps glided through the air, shedding a bright light which cast no shadows.

Then he heard the solemn music of the lute. The quiet tones dispelled the darkness with their ritual sounds. The music was sad and funereal. As he listened a tragic mood came over him, followed by a plaintive breeze which made him quiver. It was as if he had sensed the symmetry of fate.

The elongated glow became a litter. Lying flat on the decorated litter, as if dead, was a woman dressed in white and gold. Her horizontal form dazzled in the night. It dazzled with sequins and sparkling jewellery. A resplendent triangle of light hung just above her head. Wrapped around her, as if made from the breeze, was a muslin cloth. She had flowers round her flowing hair, flowers between her breasts, and about her legs. She was very beautiful, like a lost angel, and a great unhappiness made her beauty shine. An amazing light shone all about her. She looked like a princess being borne off to her nocturnal bridegroom, or to her gilded resting place among the fragrant marble of a royal tomb.

He heard light funereal singing in front of her, accompanying the paradoxically joyful lutes. She was on the litter, floating in the air, with nothing bearing her aloft, except the night and the fateful breeze. The sweetly mournful music changed the air around and resounded gently off the listening stones and the ancient houses.

Filled with curiosity, he broke off from his invisible guide and followed the floating litter. He stared with fascination at the first visible being he had seen since his disembarkation.

As he stared with wide-eyed amazement, the woman suddenly opened her eyes. When she saw him she screamed piercingly into the night. The footfalls around her hurried on, and she glided more speedily through the air. The music sped on too. And the singing remained faithful to its solemnity.

He ran after her. She was sitting up now on the litter of gold brocade and rich green velvet. Flowers poured down her face like tears. She stared at him with terror and sadness in her eyes. When he got close enough to her he said:

‘Where are they taking you?'

She seemed surprised that he had spoken. He asked the question again. This time she heard him clearly, and a sigh escaped her lips. Then with a sad voice, she cried:

‘I am going where I can see people, and where people can see me.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I am going where there is some illusion,' she cried again.

He was puzzled.

‘Too much beauty is bad for the soul,' she said. ‘I want illusion. I want some ugliness. I want some suffering. I want to be visible.'

‘But I can see you,' he shouted.

‘That's because I'm leaving. Besides, you are the only one who can.'

‘Why?'

‘You are doomed.'

‘How?'

‘Doomed, or a bringer of doom.'

He stopped running after her. He was a little out of breath. He was also bewildered.

‘I hope I never meet your type again,' she screamed, as if distracted.

‘I want to be visible!' she wailed. ‘I want to be seen!'

He watched the litter grow smaller. His guide, in a cool voice, said:

‘Do you want to carry on to the square, or do you want to follow her?'

He watched as the litter stopped in front of a huge set of marble columns. Then, with mounting apprehension, he watched as it disappeared into the splendid facade of a granite temple.

Her wailing had ceased. The music was gentler. And the singing became more beautiful as it grew fainter.

Just before she vanished into the temple, he thought he saw her smile. It occurred to him that maybe she too was a paradox. Unaccountably, he sensed that somewhere in the future, in another realm, he would see her again.

Conscious for the first time that his guide had been communing with him all along, and feeling the awesome mystery of the night stealing into his bones, he continued with his journey towards the square.

He soared with an inexplicable joy when he got to the square. The tender air and the ancient palace, rectilinear and dreamlike, seemed to have drifted in from the happy realms of a forgotten childhood. He couldn't understand what it was about the square that made him feel as if he had come home after years of wandering.

The palace dominating the square was of ochred stone, and it rose high up into the maternal darkness. It was so huge that it seemed to be part of the night, and seemed to belong to the substance of all dreams. And yet it was like a spectacular stage set, lit up with coloured flares. Banners and bunting and a night-coloured flag fluttered in the breeze from its highest battlements. Pennants shone below. The palace gate was of the finest and oldest bronze. And on the gate had been carved the most extraordinary shapes of gods, and angels, and sleeping women.

The hidden spaces in the square were vast and full of gentle presences. The open air seemed eternal, as if the wind blew in from great seas. And yet there were buildings all about, partially blocking off the corners of the square. He glimpsed the passageways and the secret streets.

Opposite the mighty palace was the House of Justice, one of several. A gate of figured bronze shone from the facade of the house. On the far side of the square, he could make out a loggia. It was dark in the loggia, and its darkness bristled.

He looked all about him and then moved with a wondering heart to the centre of the square. Turning round and round like a child, he gazed at the miraculous architecture with awestruck eyes. He breathed in the charmed open spaces. He drank in the blessed sky. He kept looking at everything, soaking in the strange enchantment of the air.

He felt as if he had stepped into the great old dreams he had heard tell about, where the dreamers find themselves in that place in all the universe where they feel most at home, and where their deepest nature can breathe and be free.

He felt he was in that place where he could step out of himself and into unbounded realms.

The truth was that he felt he had arrived at his life's true destination. He felt it as a mood of at-homeness. Then he felt that the longing for his true destination was itself the mood of the square.

Suddenly, he had an odd premonition. He sensed that his true destination was a place that he would eventually lose, would set out from, continuing his original search. Then, after finding what he wanted, and discovering that it wasn't what he really wanted, he would set out, on a sad quest, to the place he had lost, and would never find it again. He felt all this as in a dream.

At that moment, overcome with a dark happiness, he suddenly sensed that all the magic and the blessedness, the enchantment and the mystery, the wisdom of the civilisation and the majesty of the city, all were doomed. They were doomed the way beautiful things are doomed. But doomed in order to become higher, and last forever, in the places where things are most powerful and truly endure, in the living dreams of the universe.

He suspected, in a flash, how he too was doomed. But before he could reduce the intuition to a thought, he felt his guide leaving him. He felt his departing guide as a clear melody, a perfect enigma.

His mind became as anonymous as the night. Unfinished thoughts bristled in the dark loggias of his consciousness.

The guide, in his unique way, had passed on to him some things he needed to know. He had done this mysteriously, and in silence. The guide had made him hear them in the air, from the city stones, from the architecture, and from the streets. The guide had made the night speak to him.

The guide left without a farewell, and yet a sweetness lingered, as of sweet moments spent in the company of the serene and rich in spirit.

On that island, even the children were wise.

He was standing there, alone, in the middle of the square, when he saw a mattress with white bedcovers brought to him in the dark. He didn't see the people who brought it, but they put the mattress on the stone floor of the square, dressed it neatly into a bed, and left. Soon afterwards unseen hands brought him a jug of water, a diamond glass for drinking, a rose, and a cluster of grapes. They set them down at the head of his bed. Then, not long afterwards, they brought him a lamp which glowed brightly, but whose glow created not illumination, but a deeper darkness. Then, finally, they brought him a mirror.

When they left, the square was silent again. Then the breeze blew through, stirring the memories of the stones, awakening the dreams of the open spaces, and reviving the darkened forms under the bristling loggias.

The darkness was intense all around him because of the lamp's paradoxical glow, but farther away things were clearer. The square seemed bathed in a softly radiant moonlight.

He sat gently in the mystery of the square. He sat on his white bed, afloat in limpid moonlight. The palace loomed before him with its impenetrable walls and its massive gate. The great flag and its symbols fluttered in the gentle breeze, sending the hidden meaning of its sign and motto to all the regions of the mysterious land.

He contemplated the overwhelming mystery of the square. He studied its bronze equestrian rider. He gazed upon its sea-god and horses emerging from a giant fountain of adamant. And he pondered its guardian figure of an ancient prophet-king who stood poised in dreaming marble before his own mystic annunciation of courage.

The equestrian rider was on a high diamond platform. With the hand bearing the shining sword of truth, he was pointing ever-forward to a great destiny and destination, never to be reached, because if reached the people and their journey would perish. He was pointing to an ever-moving destination, unspecified except in myth, the place of absolute self-realisation and contentment which must always be just beyond the reach of the brave land, but not so much beyond reach that the people would give up in perfection's despair, and set up tent somewhere between the sixth and final mountain.

The horse, with one mighty foot raised, was itself a sign and a dream. Its head was lofty and its eyes blazed with the will of the master.

The equestrian rider, massive, proud, and humble, was bathed in darkness, and partly hidden. It stood off the centre of the square. It was awkwardly placed, and yet remained the strange focus of all the geometric measurements and the astrological configurations. It always had to be rediscovered.

The sea-god with his gleaming white steeds in the midst of the turbulent fountain was to the extreme left of the palace, and one of its guardians. He too was a dream and a sign. With his mighty beard and glistening trident, the sea-god seemed to be emerging from the depths of the ocean. The steeds, galloping on the churning waves, were resplendent. The sea-god, with trident held high, pointing to the immutable stars, was the ever-rising dream of the people's origins. He was the enactor of their resurrection from the terrors of the ocean bed. He seemed to bring with him a terrible light, from the unnameable source. The light he brings is absolute, difficult, and luminous.

The figure of the prophet-king stands in the space between loggia and palace, and has stood there for centuries, old in time, young in myth, fresh in body. He stands at the intersection between visibility and invisibility. He also stands at the moment before – the moment before he enters into legend.

Anxiety is etched on his brow. Supreme calm reigns over his face.

From the gleaming light of his body can be sensed the preparation in the fields, the solitude of the hills, the wrestling with demons, the music of the lyre, the eternal youth of the spirit, the happiness with nature, the angels visible in the mountains at night, and the voice of the unnameable in every rock and flower.

From the anxiety of his pose can be sensed kingship and weariness and old age of the spirit, fame and sad wars, temptations into which he will fall, and from which he will rise, life without the music of the lyre, without angels in the mountains, and without the whisperings of the unnameable in the trees and on the wind.