Tales and Imaginings (15 page)

The ground ends a foot before me; I fling myself back from the drop, fall, slip forward, stop myself on the very edge.

I lie absolutely motionless, eyes shut, body flattened on a slope to a brink, fingers stretched over smooth ground, till my heart quietens.

A cave, a cliff below. A shallow hollow in a cliff-face, curved. Night; a vast pale disc hanging in the sky.

Very carefully I raise myself a little, look about. The back of the cave curves down under me, falls away rimlessly at my heels into the cliff-face. Hemispherical, almost perfect. The opening several times higher than myself, circular, slightly elongated at one side like the corner of an eye. The ground, the surface of the hollow, the
substance
of the cliff, black. The orb bigger than the sun, paler than the moon, on my level, in black sky, exactly opposite me. Its dim light floods the hollow and seeps into the black material, diluting its outer layers. The ground does not feel like glass or crystal, though, but neutral in warmth, like ebony, with faint swellings and concavities more palpable than visible.

It is clear at a glance that there is no way out of the recess except by the cliff-face. It seems possible that the elongated side of the opening gives onto a ledge, but at the thought of moving closer to explore it a qualm of distress runs through my body and mind. I lie staring out at the dark and its central pool of light until I feel
enough stillness in me to face the view of the depth. But when at last I inch my head out over the edge it takes my mind some time to interpret the shimmering recessions my eyes plunge into. The cliff stretches downwards as far as I can see, densely black, filmed with dewy light. The sky differs from it in being the black of
emptiness
, negativity. The two are separated by a delicate, precise line at an incalculable distance. On either side of me is the same unbroken endlessness. As I turn myself cautiously to look upwards I realize that I want to find this vertical horizon a complete circle, that its absolute simplicity of form is more important to me at this moment than the possibility of an escape-route. And indeed there is no visible limit to the cliff above; it meets the sky in a perfect
circle
all about me. The beauty of this limitless world silences my mind, forbidding hope and despair.

I lie still until time begins to be measured again, but only by a slow increase of loneliness. My mind roves wider and wider over the cliff in search of life. Might there be other crannies in which anything similar to myself hides from the force of gravity that hunts across the face of this world? When the sense of isolation
overcomes
my paralysis I crawl forward to the side of the opening. It does appear that it would be possible to hold myself in the narrow channel leading from it, which slants slightly downwards across the face of the cliff and ends a few yards away in what could be the lip of another hollow. A vision of a tunnel, an escape inwards, away from the terrible motionless wind of gravity that threatens to suck me into emptiness, makes my mind yearn forwards. I ease myself into the groove, a half-cylinder just deeply curved enough to hold my body, with my head turned inwards so as not to hear the
seductive
silence of the abyss an inch to one side. But just ahead the
channel
narrows a little before funnelling into the recess beyond. Even as I make the first slight move to round the obstruction I know I am about to slip off. My hands go over the edge first. For a
moment I lie upside down on the cliff-face, and then turn right over as my body clenches itself against the impact my mind knows will never come.

I am in a slanting oval niche, half crouched, half leaning against the black slope. The vast luminary almost fills the sky; I have to lean outwards to see the narrow rim of soot-black between it and the more solid black of the cliff, which has lost its sheen of light. I
cannot
decide if the orb is a sun or a moon, whether it dominates or is dominated by this vertical world. It is so huge, all-illuminating,
all-embracing
, and yet looks so tenuous my breath could disperse it. There is
an almost imperceptible wavering in its luminosity, a
drifting
and mingling of smoky perturbations like shadows of
multitudes
of subtle thoughts playing across a composed face. Nothing in its appearance gives any clue as to its distance. Does it ever touch the cliff? I imagine it would not annihilate it, merely rest on it like a moth for an instant before withdrawing softly. The nature of the cliff has changed too; it is now impenetrable by the light, and its irregularities are even less marked. My hands are already wearied of maintaining a hold on its featureless surface. I am almost glad when I begin to slide inexorably into emptiness, knowing that I will quickly lose consciousness of this world in the fall. For a moment I see my own reflection turning with me, between the hazy sphere and its faintly rippling image in the cliff.

It is so dark it takes me some time to work out that I am standing spreadeagled with my back to the cliff, my feet on a slight
projection
so smooth I know I will not be able to balance myself on it for long. The light in the sky is a tiny round spot opposite me, visibly waning. I am determined not to fall before it has entirely
disappeared
,
before this day or year in the cliff’s existence has ended. My back and limbs are aching by the time it dwindles to a point and flickers out, leaving utter darkness, and is instantly reborn. As it grows I find I can see far across the cliff’s surface from this
vantage-point
. There are no other footholds, no hiding-places. Nothing stirs within the immeasurable distant circle of the horizon. But the depths all around do not frighten me now. I wish though that I could remain conscious for longer when I eventually fall. I am
certain
that I would never reach a ground, that this world is an
infinity
turned on edge. I exult over the chance that has casually crucified me here to glimpse the cliff’s slow progress towards purity. The face of the light is brighter now, untroubled, almost inert, its edge determinate against the black of the void. I imagine the future of this harmonious world given over to the play of light and gravity, the cliff making itself a mirror for the passing of time, time purging itself of incident, shaped only by the pulse of matter’s blind meditation on its own nature as a coast of the sea of time, enduring, against which time culminates, from which time ebbs, to which time is
drawn back out of nothingness, its flow unchecked by incidents, histories, irregularities, unimpeded even by the
infinitesimal
pressure of my vision, which I can now withdraw, by letting myself go, fall, float, fade.

My hands slip from their hold even as I wake; I twist in space, see the star an ultimate of white, the cliff a flawless black, myself drowning between them.

Since then, rare moments of falling, each instantly extinguished, and the last some time ago. Regret for a world that in perfecting itself has excluded me.

They, every living person in the whole world, all of them, were stolen – or stole – away from me while I dozed after love. I had felt her head lift from my shoulder, and after a pause, to which
thinking
back on it later I could assign no length, her lips had rested on my forehead for a moment. Then she had unclothed my body’s warmer side of hers, let the sheet fall in her place, slipped my restraining murmur. All that some time before I woke.

I woke, not hearing the expected kettle settled on the stove downstairs, the bright twinned cries of saucers on the tray, cups and teaspoons on the saucers. The morning was summer, yet it was not quite usual that her gown still hung with mine behind the door.

I would have called had not the silence closed itself against my call.

Naked too, I stood at the stair-head; all the doors of the upper rooms were open, all the upper rooms were empty. I stood on chill tiles in the hall below; all the doors were open, rooms empty. The front door open, the garden empty.

A loose horse-step. At the garden gate the piebald pony from the riding-school next door lifted its hoof to free it from the loop of reins trailing from its mouth, and moved away as I came down the path.

Leaning over the gate I saw the other ponies cropping the verges here and there in the lane, reins lying loosely across saddles.

Every room of the house empty, once again. At the head of the stairs I picked up the telephone and carried it to the bed, dialled a number at random, let it ring and ring and ring.

Had she lifted her head from my shoulder to listen to
something
? To listen for something?

It began to be cold.

She stepped into the bedroom with her arm raised to take her gown from the back of the door, and stood, arm still raised, eyes widening towards me, hearing the quiet weeping of the telephone in my lap.

Someone lifted the distant receiver, and I replaced mine.

She lifted the two gowns off the hook with one grasp, separated them and tossed me mine. She sat beside me, found a box with one match in her pocket. We bent our heads together to light our
cigarettes
at the single flame.

‘I was looking for you in the garden‚’ she said. ‘You weren’t in the house.’

‘I looked for you too, in the house and in the garden; you weren’t there.’

The loose hoof-falls had scanned themselves again; the line of ponies was passing the gate, with laughter of the girl riders.

I laughed too and fell back on the bed. ‘Well, and how was that managed? Everyone got out of the world for a while then got back into it? Except me!’

‘No, I was the sole exception! But I can imagine how it was done, though I’m not a scientist. A crowded train comes into a crowded station; if you are on the train you see everyone else get out, if you are on the platform you see everyone else get in.’

‘That was very clever! But what about aeroplanes in the sky at that moment? The risk of disasters?’

‘You talk as if I masterminded it all! You’re the one who tells me about automatic pilots and computers that can keep things going
for a while. Probably the little planes that don’t have computers all happened to have alighted just before it happened. Everything that couldn’t be sustained in motion was gently brought to rest and nothing broken. We’ll read about it in the evening paper.’

‘I think we won’t. Perhaps a few rationalizations, why the power-supply faltered, why the countdowns were held up. I think anyway these moments are briefer for other folk than us; they skip over them. But you are not like that. Please tell me where you were?’

‘Not for an instant was I not here! Looking for you, every moment of the time!’

I pulled her face down to me and looked into her grey eyes, as I have often done since, not pressing the question but waiting until she murmurs, as she did then, teasingly or reproachfully, I do not know which, ‘But you were the one that went away …’

I read too much, remember little, understand nothing – nothing to its core, that is; on the outer surfaces of knowledge I handle myself well enough, browsing with a goat’s eclecticism. Piles of books by my bed, tottering like the jungle cities I used to dream of as a teenager, occasionally fall by night and frighten my little terrier bitch asleep in her basket.

The following happened at some late hour. The dog went to the door – the bedroom opens onto the garden – and whined. After a while I closed my book on the name of Chios, and got up to let her out. A vertical blade of cold air entered. Small-eyed from print, I peered through the gap. The leafless birch at the end of the lawn was motionless, blanched by the shaft of light from the door. Above, spanning the perfect blackness, hung a huge empty
framework
of stars. My breath caught in my throat, as always when I’m confronted. Orion the Hunter, a mile high, a thousand miles high.

Orion is
at once the most overbearingly transcendent of
constellations
, and the most immediately, most humanly, identifiable. One notices his belt first, three stars of equal magnitude evenly spaced, slanting up the sky in a line almost exactly straight but just perceptibly upcurved too, like sequent notes of a scale, a hunting horn’s bright echoing challenge. Above that, a perfect (to my eye) Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangle, the longest side horizontal and marked
out by two bright stars, the vertex a little fainter, the whole tensed across a wide sector of the night. As a child I learned from my father that this was Orion’s bow, raised and drawn, but star charts now tell me it is his club or his shoulders. The hero’s sword is
a line of dim stars depending from his belt, and his feet are two very prominent stars. Farther down the sky to the east is
the most
brilliant
of all, Sirius, the Dog Star; I remember my father pointing out how it followed its master through the night.

On my way back to bed I picked out a few reference books from the shelves: Lemprière’s
Classical
Dictionary,
some modern equivalent of it, and Graves’s crotchety old Penguins of Greek myths.

It seems that Sirius is
not in fact Orion’s dog; its legend is
quite separate, part of a horrible mutual engendering of monsters from the most primitive level of myth. Echidna, half woman, half snake, mates with Typhon, and gives birth to Hell’s three-headed
watchdog
Cerberus, the many-headed Hydra, the Chimaera, and Sirius, a two-headed dog which later belonged to the robber Geryon and itself sired two baleful creatures on its own mother, the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion. Both Sirius and the lion were to be killed by Heracles. All this from Hesiod’s
Theogony
– but my father’s word prevails over this most ancient and therefore probably corrupt source: a hunter needs a dog, and Sirius is
Orion’s, and always will be. The bow too is
not in the ancient sources, according to which Orion flourishes his club at a flock of doves, the little constellation of the Pleiades, fluttering just beyond his reach to the west. When Odysseus, on the shores of the River of Ocean, fills a trench with sacrificial blood and stands over it with drawn sword to keep back the mighty dead who come to drink, he sees among them ‘the giant hunter Orion, rounding up game on the meadows of asphodel, the very beasts his living hands had killed among the lonely hills, armed with a club of solid bronze that could never be broken’. The name Orion means ‘dweller on mountains’.

What is this tale of the Pleiades? They were the seven virgin companions of Artemis the Huntress, whom the gods turned into doves to save them from Orion’s pursuit. Orion had been hunting with Artemis, and her brother Apollo was concerned for her chastity too, and incited Mother Earth against him by telling her of Orion’s boast that he would kill off all beasts and monsters. Earth sent a huge scorpion against Orion, who leaped into the sea and swam towards Delos, where once he had slept with Eos, the goddess Dawn. Apollo pointed out the distant figure among the waves to Artemis and told her that it was a villain who had seduced one of her priestesses, and in her anger she shot an arrow through Orion’s head; then, grief-stricken, she placed his image in the stars, where it is eternally pursued across the sky by the constellation Scorpio.

Eos, I read, still blushes in remembering her affair with Orion. Their meeting is part of another legend in which the hunting of beasts is entangled with the violation of woman. Orion had promised to rid the island of Chios of wild beasts, in return for the king’s daughter Merope; but when he came to claim his reward the king put him off with false reports of other beasts to be killed. The
frustrated
hunter got drunk, burst into Merope’s room and raped her, and then fell into a stupor on the shore. The vengeful king found him there, and put out his eyes as he slept. The oracle later told Orion that he could regain his sight by travelling east until he faced Heleus, the sun, rising from the Stream of Ocean. So Orion rowed out to sea, and followed the sound of hammers until he came to Vulcan’s forge, where he snatched up an apprentice, Cedalion, to be his guide. Cedalion led him to the farthest ocean, where Eos saw and fell in love with him – for he was ‘the handsomest of men’ – and persuaded her brother Heleus to cure him.

What is
one to make of this barbaric stuff? Searching for solace in the brutal rigmaroles of the Orion legend, my mind went back to a painting that arrested me once and made me stay and wonder,
as I was making my way footsore and eye-sated out of the
Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York: Poussin’s ‘Landscape with Orion’. I wished I had a clearer memory of it, or a reproduction. The landscape radiates cool light like cumulus clouds from which dawn is about to break. Cedalion is a tiny figure perched on Orion’s shoulder and bending to his ear with encouraging words. Vulcan indicates the way ahead, a sheep-track winding through a tender, spacious countryside with noble trees in the middle distance and a richly various mountain skyline; one imagines birdsong and
rippling
streams. In the twilit sky Artemis observes the hero
protectively
from a pearly cleft in the clouds like the aperture of a cowry shell. Orion is huge but not monstrous, a splendid golden-skinned figure of a man, striding forward in joyful expectation, his arms swimming before him in the air. I may have misremembered the details, but of this I am sure, that every form in the painting is
opulent
, restorative, pregnant with happiness and perhaps with
reconciliation
, between the terrible hunter and the peaceful hills, between gods and mortals, and even, without forcing the sense of the legend too much, between man and woman.

As I reached for a pen to make a note of this, I heard my little dog’s excited voice from the shrubbery, more of a whimper than a bark, and then a deep baying that seemed to roll around some huge unidentifiable volume of space. The door, which I had left slightly ajar for the dog when it should choose to come in, was pushed a
little
wider open. Something blackish disengaged itself from black night in the gap, and slipped inside. Every instinct in my body cried out that it was an animal – its scent immediately filled the room, as complicated as a thicket, with flowers and bitter berries and foxy dung beneath – but I could see that it was human: a slight, ragged, dark-visaged male. My breath stopped in my throat, but he
immediately
showed he meant no harm by turning to leave his stick propped in a corner. He was so thin he looked as if he were
edgeways
-on
even when he turned to me, and perhaps only four or five feet high but so crooked and angular he might have been able to stretch up to the ceiling. I would have spoken, but he glanced at my mouth as if it were an unusual plant, and this silenced me. He looked around for a place for himself; I indicated the chair
opposite
the foot of the bed, but he settled down into the space between it and a lamp on the floor, entwining his fingers on one bent knee and resting his chin on them. His eyes were blue like clear zenith sky, but fixed, as if they were part of a frozen mass filling his skull. He was old; he might have been newly delivered out of the ages like a corpse given up by a glacier. It was difficult in the complicated half-lights of my various lamps to distinguish his tattered,
thong-tied
clothes from his skin, which was seamed and scarred; even the backs of his hands buckled in ridges as he flexed his fingers. His tawny, ash-streaked hair was tied back with a convolvulus stem that carried two or three dying blossoms of stained ivory. But there was wealth about him too, gleams of amber and quartz in the caverns of his sleeves. The perspective of the room seemed to have reorganized itself around him, as if his body were of such a density as to distort space; he lay at the bottom of a depth; I was clinging to the rim. I could make nothing of him; incomprehensibility was engrained in him like a darkness. He projected shadows round the room, wolf-packs of them shifting in corners, isolated scraps of spiderweb drifting across the ceiling. These appearances were his language, I knew, as were the effluvia filling my nostrils: spore-borne fungal damps, aromatic mist-globules sprayed from trodden beechmast, hazy reek of grass-fires beyond the horizon; and even closer
feelings
: a sliver of muddy ice in my mouth, a river-cold nugget of gold in my palm, the suck of a snail pulled off my forehead. I could do nothing with these forcings of my senses; I opened books –
astronomy
came to hand – and flung my thoughts against him.

Orion! I began, mighty hunter! – and suddenly all the scents and
skin-touchings were withdrawn and the flickering shades became still and attentive. – Can you conceive of the vastness of space, and how you are honoured in it? Consider the fundamental datum of our cosmos, the speed of light, a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, large beyond imagination, but crucially not infinite, whose finitude in fact gives scale to all things. Even at that
unsurpassable
velocity light takes six
hundred and fifty years to reach Earth from your left foot, the star called Rigel. That’s how many trillions of miles? Those numbers: quadrillions, sextillions! I used to mouth them like mantras as a child, and last night I came across them for the first time for years in Walt Whitman: ‘I hold a leaf of grass to be the journeywork of the stars … and the mouse is a
miracle
to confound a quadrillion atheists!’ What’s the relationship of the leaf to the star? A poet friend once remarked on the accuracy with which the sunbeam strikes the seed – being ignorant of the sun’s copious output of light in all directions, falling indifferently on good grain or stony ground or, most of it, on nothing, anywhere, ever. Unimaginable floods of photons poured forth by distant suns, that we can see them! Do you know anything of stars? Your eastern shoulder: Betelgeuse, a ‘red giant’ in the star-catalogues, and noticeably reddish on a clear night, four hundred times the diameter of the sun, ten thousand times as luminous, but a mere dot to us, being two hundred and seventy light years away. I’ll tell you what the
visibility
of that dot implies. Betelgeuse emits so many photons that even when they have spread out over the surface of a sphere two hundred and seventy light years in radius – that’s one and a half million billion miles – they are still dense enough for our eyes to detect them, so there must be several of them passing through each little area the size of the pupil of an eye every second. Imagine that spherical surface divided up into elements a tenth of an inch across, like an composite insect eye of a zillion facets, but introverted, focused on its own centre, absorbing star-dazzle in its totality into
retinal blackness! But the adjustment of star to eye is illusory; a nearer or brighter star would burn out the optic nerve, and there are uncountable fainter and farther ones peppering the void in
bottomless
gradations whose photons arrive too thinly for our senses. Do these abysses make you dizzy? They are as nothing to the
background
, the Galaxy as a whole, the Catherine wheel we see from within as the Milky Way, a hundred thousand light years across, built of a hundred billion stars. Which itself is
as nothing, among some hundred billion galaxies spattered throughout space and
fading
out of vision fifteen billion light years away Your stars are bright because they are comparatively near, they all belong to the same spiral of our Galaxy as the Sun; we call it the Orion Arm, you are part of our address. The familiar constellations are the nursery decorations of life, though, that’s their significance. Do you want to know how life begins, oh great engenderer? It could be happening within you at this moment! Consider that vague smudge of light among the stars of your sword – or is
it an ejaculation of your
phallus
? – the Orion Nebula, a cloud of matter millions of miles across, all of a glow from the birth of stars within it. Whorls of gas pulled in on themselves by their own gravity, condensing into spheres, pressures rising, atomic reactions beginning. And when stars have gone through their long evolution – almost as long as all the past – and ever more complex processes in them have built the heavier nuclei out of hydrogen, the simple primordial stuff, they collapse inwards, and then explode, and suffuse space with carbon, nitrogen, iron and the rest, the rich and rare. In the hearts of nebulae like yours, sheltered from the ultraviolet radiation that disinfects open space, these elements can settle in the microscopic grooves on grains of dust and combine themselves into molecules even as complex as amino acids, the keys to self-replication, to life itself. The
journey-work
of the stars! Then all they have to do is
fall with meteors onto a hospitable planet like ours, not too far from a decent star, and in
no time at all – amoebae, birds of paradise, pyramids, computers! Perhaps it’s all happened elsewhere a trillion times, perhaps it has only happened once, and that’s why you have had to come here to learn about yourself. But note this: the distances from here to your several stars are quite various; I have the statistics. Your dog Sirius is only the brightest star in our sky because it is one of the nearest, just 8.8 light years, that’s no more than fifty million million miles. So your splendid outline is a
.
trick of perspective. Viewed from the Pole Star, for instance, you do not exist. ‘Constellation’ is the name of an act, the quintessentially human act of joining up the dots, leaping over the dark, stringing events into stories, stories into
persons
, persons into history. Before we came, stars unnamed bloomed and seeded and blew away like dandelion fluff. And we may not always be here to keep up the pretence of meaning. We could, out of shame at the brief trouble of thought, memory and lust we have brought upon the earth, commit suicide. We have the means, we have the bombs, it only needs the will. I like to imagine a few uncomprehending survivors – descendants of prisoners forgotten in a saltmine, say – emerging generations later into a world of calcined cities and caramelized nature; they explore, they come to understand that humanity has done away with itself, they creep back underground and immure themselves, to keep faith with our
ultimate
loss of faith. That could be how it ends. Or indefinitely else-wise, with slow trailing edges, stories petering out into points of suspension, constellations drifting out of shape. And afterwards, just the dislocated clockwork bits of heaven ratcheting away, to no end, world without end. Or can you see better in the future?
Einstein
wondered if a traveller at the speed of light carrying a mirror would find himself reflected in it. What did you see, riding time into my quiet historical garden, oh Dweller on the Mountains?