Judith (38 page)

I mean, what child might be able to live in this strange territory?

Well, it has been said often enough, has it not, that there was a prohibition only against eating from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil: there was no prohibition against eating from the Tree of Life. So humans, having language, ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. Language is counter-productive; they did not eat of the Tree of Life.

But a mutation (like a god) would know all this.

So the Tree of Life would then still be waiting round some corner – the child with its hand, as it were, on the collar of some fatted calf – or lamb?

I was treading carefully through the fir plantation. All this was in my mind. What is it that you can or cannot do with your mind: let it run: watch it? I was walking through the battle-area. I knew very little about the battle-area. I did not know about unexploded bombs or mines. I knew there was a sensation as if I were treading lightly on air a few inches off the ground: is this what people in Byzantine frescoes feel – that there might be trip-wires? You have been walking some time through the maze and then the bottom falls out: you hold out your arms: you are like a bird. I mean you are that which remains (are you?) when the rest has fallen through the grid, the riddle; which is the bottom of the maze.

Do you really think one is not mad if one can refer statements about the possibility back to oneself?

There were bracken and brambles underfoot: one had to step high to get through. I did not think the child would have come this way.

The battle-area was somewhere where men went to play games. They went there for no other purpose except for games: so – for once – there was no confusion. Men always play games; so in a place where there were no pretences, might there not also be something quite different – that which might grow apart from the pretences (and the predatoriness) of humans?

You once got us all into that cell, that stage: the cell was in our minds: we were in a theatre. We had to put up our hands and push against a wall – the front wall of the stage. This wall did not exist. Then we were to be hurled, like seeds, over the ploughed land of an audience.

The Tree of Life is something whose light contains its own shadow?

I was going through the wood with the light like bits of stained glass. Then ahead it became whiter. I thought – A rainbow is refracted back to its original sun. Or – A mutation might be something that would refract out, and back, and so be itself; and by this be more than itself.

I was coming to the edge of the wood. You do not see beyond the front of a stage unless the lights come on in the theatre.

Then the game is over.

By the end, the characters on a stage are often dead anyway.

But you could get up and walk about amongst an audience saying – Is it you? is it you?

Hullo, my little one.

I thought – Perhaps the child inside me will grow exposed to this strange sun and will live in its light-and-dark branches?

I was coming to the edge of the wood. It was here that the light was brighter. It was as if I were about to see through a further peephole of that box: then there would be, would there
not, that bright-and-green landscape which makes its own light: and I should be able to walk amongst it.

The ground seemed to fall away at the edge of the wood. Of course, from that bomb, there might be little bits of death coming down: or seeds – you could tell the difference?

I sat on a tree-stump. What was it like when the child lay on the edge of that bed; do you remember?

You know how when you are writing or painting (have I said this before!) there is the impression that you are not creating but discovering what is already there: you have been going along in the dark for some time: is it here, is it there: then suddenly – what else is the excitement! You have been helpless for so long: well not quite helpless because you know (you have had these glimpses!) that what you are doing is uncovering; and so what is to be uncovered is there. The discipline is in the faith: you do not know what, but you know that: there has to be also, I suppose (how can you say this!), courage, skill; the skill being partly perhaps in knowing how to say – Ah, skill, how can you say that! So you let yourself go; with diligence, with pain: and then suddenly – by neither accident nor design; you have been blown round some corner – there is this extraordinary landscape.

The ground fell away into the rolling green parkland that I had seen before; in which light seemed to come not from reflection but from the objects themselves; in which trees seemed to contain their own shadows and sheep were dotted on the ground like stars. It was like the land of the hills beyond the estuary; the flowers like trees and the trees like large flowers; birds in the air like notes of music. It was also like that courtyard with the bird or finger coming down: also that place beyond the dust, I suppose, beyond the empty nest, beyond the frame, where no one except the child was looking.

The colours were vibrations; as was the music. It was indeed a landscape into which man might be said not yet to have come: because he came only to play games – and so he might be said deliberately not to have touched it.

There were thousands of lambs together with the sheep.
They were like those seeds, those chances of mutation, fallen on this ground, and waiting to see what might nourish them.

There was a road running through the landscape at the bottom of a slope – the road might almost be a river by the way it so much glistened. Or a snake – might it not be a snake? – coming down from a tree, and going for a drink along a road that could be a river.

You know that game in which you are supposed to find out, or test, the patterns of people's minds: you ask them to draw a house, a road, a river, a horse, a snake, a tree. And according to what story can be inferred from what they draw – the snake crossing the road towards the house: the horse cut off from the tree by the river – you think you can tell what is going on in their minds. But supposing there is in fact a house, a horse, a road, a snake, a tree: you have found out – what? – just that it is a sort of game that goes on in people's minds?

There was in fact a house, or what looked like a house, at the bottom of the slope, down by the road or the river. It was a house because it had four walls, a roof, a chimney: but it had nothing else; no attributes; no garden, path, outhouse, fence. It seemed as if it might be an idea of a house, before humans put anything on to it.

So – This is the nature of this strange territory?

Or do you think it was all to do with the angle of the late afternoon sun which was shining quite brightly now: like the face of a drunk man falling behind a table?

What one has to get used to, I suppose, is living and not just striving like this: chipping at the stone: being at home with what is there; watching with reverence in this strange territory. Not asking what it is – or how can you find it? Of course the language is difficult. It has to circle itself: at the centre there is silence.

If one is able to walk at all in this strange territory (humans or post-humans coming down from the plains) would there not be the impression, yes, of its being precisely oneself and yet not oneself walking (the pencil or brush or whatever moving), this conjunction of what is one and what is the
other being just what is emergent in the landscape – what one is discovering. And then one would know, yes, what is to be done as one knows this with a piece of writing or in a painting: just going along, in some sort of transport – of ecstasy or despair. You once said, did you not – Ecstasy and despair are the only two emotions worth having.

Or – The state of grace is where the two mean the same thing.

I was walking over the rolling grassland down to the house by the road. There were the trees dotted about like bright black holes or stars. There were not many sheep on the slope; they were farther down in the valley.

I wondered – What one cannot bear about the sun, perhaps, is simply the excitement.

Of course there might still be danger! Those bits and pieces of bombs like splinters coming down from a skylight –

The building that I was approaching – something that could be drawn in a second or two, perhaps: four lines and a roof like a hat with a bobble of a chimney on top – would be a diagram representing – well, what? the family as a statistical unit? whatever it is that is the average? the subject (or object) of an advertisement on television? Take the lid off and you would see – the family of four to six people round the breakfast-table; consuming the things they have seen a family like themselves consuming on television; smiling and looking rather daft as people do when posing for a camera. When I got close I saw that it was indeed a mock-up of a house: four walls and a roof but no doors or windows; these were just painted on; there was even painted, roughly, a figure of what might be a father or a mother or a child (or an enemy) leaning out of one of the windows. The construction had been used, obviously, in the games of war: in war you do not need real buildings; you like knocking them down, so why not have something you can put up again quickly? But was not this, indeed, somehow representative of the games of the family of four to six people around the breakfast-table? a board perhaps upon which two or more people try to occupy the same space at the same time;
on which someone succeeds, and someone fails, and someone is sent back to the beginning? I thought – Or perhaps the house has just been dumped at the side of the road like the Holy House of Loreto – come whizzing through the air as some encouragement or warning: the warning being just that this is, indeed, what families are like: unless – unless what? – you get away? whizz yourself like a bird over landscapes? There were perhaps, inside the house, my own father and mother arguing, complaining, cajoling: but I had seen myself in this, had I not? and forgiven it. All this was now like a stage-set. That one could move round it, through it, might be holy.

I walked round the building to find out if I could see inside: there might even be a further peephole: having taken the lid off the box, one might see beyond. One end of the construction was not bricked up: it was barricaded roughly with corrugated iron sheeting. There was indeed some crack or peephole through: at first I could see nothing. I thought – Don't be taken in by this! nothingness in the holy of holies? Then as my eye became accustomed I could make out – hay, fodder, racks for feeding sheep. I thought – Well, this is a bit corny: you mean just – Feed my sheep? The family of four to six around the breakfast-table? Perhaps I should go on? There was a board at the side of the corrugated sheeting which had on it in antique lettering ‘The Old Mill'. I thought – Well, what might be a more recent dispensation?

The road went on towards the brow of a gentle hill. Everything was bright, and still, and exact: to do with the senses. The senses were not what interpreted the outside world: they were part of the outside world themselves: each composed, was composed of, the other. This was the at-oneness, the identity, that people longed for, I suppose, with drugs: but it was with drugs that the sun burned: in the state of grace I had gone round the sun, as it were, and here was the back way. I thought – It is as if we ourselves, now, through some further peephole, are bits and pieces of light.

The sheep and lambs were innumerable here. They were lying in the road; the road was warm to lie on; traffic seldom
came. As I went past, the sheep watched me; they stretched their necks; they did not move to get out of the way. I thought – Even when people come to play games here, the sheep know that what they are doing is playing games.

The lambs stood sometimes and shook their tails so that little bits of light seemed to fall.

The column of smoke, in the direction of the airbase, was dispersing in a cloud. I thought – The tablecloth is shaken by those reclining figures; crumbs like bits of grey dust fall to the ground.

There were some strange blue flowers at the edge of the road. Their heads were like small sunflowers, their stems like trees. I thought – They are eyes? they are mutations? there is dust at the side of the road.

I came to the brow of a hill where the road went over to a valley. I stopped: there was the same, but different, landscape below. I could see much farther – to a whole world of planes, slopes, curves, lines, parkland. It was framed by the sky. In a hollow, not far away, was a village: it was of course a toy village: six or seven houses of the same kind as the one I had left – brick walls and a roof with doors and windows painted on: shadows out of the cave-box, for people to play with. And just beyond, on a slight rise in the ground, was a church. This seemed to be a real church. I mean, it was made of stone; it had a high wire fence around it; it looked derelict, destitute; which the other buildings, the toys, did not. I thought – You mean, it is one of those forbidden areas within the forbidden area, like the façade, the tomb? The church, I mean, had presumably been preserved because it was some ancient and sacred monument: it was one of those lumps beneath the skin: it was dead or dying: all its openings were boarded up. But it did have, yes – this was what Eleanor had told me to look for – a piece knocked out of its spire, which hung at an angle. I thought – You mean this X marks the spot? If it cannot be the spot itself (poor church!) it can be that cross: a finger?

It seemed that there must once have been a real village here – which had been knocked down, to be put up again as
toys, so that people could knock it down and put it up more easily.

Also – The spire of that church is like the flailing arms of Petrouchka?

I went down towards the village. The houses were in a group round a village square; there was (surprise!) nothing in the square; it was one of those spaces from within which it seems that things are going on elsewhere. You know those pictures in which there are colonnades and arches; a statue on a pedestal, perhaps; smoke as if from a train round some corner: well, what is it round the corner? why is there an impression of fear? This is in our minds: what is it that we do not want to look at? I stood in the middle of the square. One of the buildings had its corrugated-iron covering at the end pulled back: just inside this opening there seemed to be – you remember fear? is it not like a bottom falling out? – just inside the opening there was what seemed to be a pair of legs sticking out: legs with no feet, covered with old sacking. I thought – But of course, if they were legs, they would have feet: in this place, of course, it is a toy. There were heartbeats going off in small explosions in my ears. I approached the building. The ground was dusty: no flowers grew: I thought – This is the nest of stones? Within the entrance, propped up with its back against the wall, was a dummy: you know those pictures? heads stitched up and stuffed with straw? It was wearing some sort of uniform – Russian or German or American or whatever: I mean a life-size dummy of a soldier, propped up against the wall just inside the entrance of the building as if it were on guard: a wooden rifle even across its knees; an old cap stitched on to its head; but no feet; I thought – In such circumstances, indeed, why should it have been given feet? The dummy was lolling sideways; it seemed to have been stuck through, at some time, with a bayonet. I thought – But who has placed it here now? What an enigmatic angel to be guarding the back way!