Tales and Imaginings (4 page)

‘Not just yet, thanks. Tell me, do you know Persimmon well?’

‘We correspond. No, that’s hardly true, I rarely write. Though in another sense it is true; we correspond, he in his city, me in my
forest
. I suppose our correspondence in the one sense eliminates the need for it in the other. No, I’m isolated; I have no connection with the city. It amuses Persimmon to think I still exist, perhaps more than it amuses me, but that’s all. Up here, in my orderly grey-green
plantations
, every day I walk around; each tree has its little cup slowly filling. Endless weeding. I supervise the work, and in the evenings the men go off to the labour-lines to watch Tarzan films, and I come back here and sit on the verandah. Not this one; this is for when I have a guest, and at the back there’s another. The view there is of a countable array of rubber-trees. Whereas on this side

Tiny birds or large moths hung in the mist of their invisible wings over a border of flame-shaped blossoms, behind which the slopes of jungle fell away sharply, leaving the eye hovering over depths of light. Cloud lay in pools like dull mirrors in various laps of the mountain below. The oily blue-green forest terminated sharply against an emerald plain of rice-fields stretched under a
silver
web of canals converging to a slow turn of the great river.
Further
away still, dark forest slopes again, a layer of mist, a mountainous horizon that perhaps was cloud, then a bank of clouds like mountains, mist; and above, among sleeping flame and high cool air, the ageing sun.

Down in the brilliant plain palmtrees stood in rows along paths linking little villages; a boy was riding a water buffalo. Every
temple
spire and tree and tiny figure cast a long precise shadow. ‘A clock with two hands tells the time better than a clock with one; a clock with three hands is more accurate than one with two. Here I have a clock with an infinity of hands; an instant is
defined before our eyes, that at which the evening breeze begins …’ A fan-shaped
sail was swung up on the distant riven. The pools of cloud below us were stirred, crept up the forest slopes, and broke slowly over the rims of the valleys. The shadow of the mountains opposite swept towards us across the plain, and overhead the evening rushed to meet it in silent gales of green and violet. The flowers trembled, the hovering things vanished.

Dark refilled his glass. ‘Did I say a countable array? My trees are numbered according to a system; I start from a place where natural chaos ends and my orderly forest begins. I penetrate deep into the plantations until the numbers become unmanageable. At some point on the boundary I start again. In fact I suppose the trees are numbered according to several systems; some have several numbers, others none. Philosophically, too, I have the instincts, but not the stamina, of the system-builder. To tell the truth, my thoughts and beliefs have faded, like memories. My character has become diffuse, like the thoughts of a solitary man, and repetitive. The memory of me visitors like you carry away must be like my forests, featureless, labyrinthine. I save you half the trouble of forgetting me; in myself I am half forgotten. Why does Persimmon still send people to me? I used to be able to reassure them when they were distressed to find their adventures had no moral, to say “Yes, we must pull down those deserted temples of the mind‚” or “You see, even indifference is
a familiar face.” But now?’

The breeze had ceased already. Around the horizon lightning was dancing noiselessly inside tall purple clouds; they were filled for a minute with a pulsating glow, and then sank back into the darkening sky. Somewhere a bird was putting crescent parentheses round various silences.

‘Sometimes I wonder if I should go back to England. A room, with a few trusted objects, a slow clock by which to relive some memorable sunsets …’ Dark’s voice seemed to come from farther away; it took a measurable effort to make my question reach him:
‘What brought you out here in the first place?’ He sipped his beer regularly, without haste; behind that he seemed to be choosing an answer with care, quietly opening drawers full of shadows,
unfolding
them, considering, and eventually selecting: ‘I came out as an entomologist, to help build the Empire of Linnaeus. But I became discouraged, not just at the thought of a lifetime spent counting the small change of the animal kingdom, but by the numbers of
individuals
of each species, the great wandering books of chance and fantasy I was sealing up with simple titles, taking a little word to lie about a multitude of eyes that look into and out of every corner of this jungle, whose leaf presses against leaf from coast to coast … But that was a stage only. The story of King Solomon and the Queen of the Ants, perhaps you know it. He paid her a state visit, and her subjects marched past in review. After the third day, or the third week, Solomon made some remark; let me try to remember what it was, now

Dark became silent. My eye was wandering among freshly
scattered
stars; eventually I could say, ‘How odd to see Orion directly overhead, and upside down! And there’s the Great Bear, pointing to the horizon!’

‘The stars, yes; we won’t talk of them.’ He went into the house, and came back with more bottles. After drinking in silence for some time, he suddenly began, ‘… which shows that one doesn’t need the wisdom of Solomon to pass the stage of feeling outnumbered. And abandoned by some invisible guarantor of one’s dominion. There is a period of groping and stumbling among the dazzling afterimages of belief; the negative ones in particular seem comforting, the emptinesses and absences as resonant as ever was the huge imaginary ally, despair as proud a feather as immortality, life a condition to which one was condemned (in absentia, as it were, the absent one being the judge, thus doubly deaf to pleadings), a condition uniquely, beguilingly, singled out by that condemnation, in dramatic
opposition to the rest, the ‘indifferent’. But beyond all that

‘After all that, the charms of monoculture became apparent?’

‘Yes
,
I tried to simplify myself; after all, why should one animal count another? Though that too is not forbidden.’

The moon, hidden from us by the house, had resurrected a frail landscape. The network of canals and paths that had marked it by day was still faintly discernible, like writing on the ash of paper after the flame has left it.

‘Our ways of seeing betray what we are looking for: a person, a letter from a person. We persist in seeing as indecipherable what was never a text; we see as a face, even if
an averted one, something that never was such an organ of expression. We have to learn not to read, not to peer for mirrors …’ He flung a bottle; it became a gleam of moonlight for a moment, and was noiselessly received by the silver web hung below us.

‘I don’t quite follow you, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow myself. Sometimes, when the great sleeping-pill of the day is beginning to work in me, I see what I want to say coming towards me, cloudily. And I travel through the evening towards it, becoming more cloudy myself. Sometimes two clouds can exchange a bolt of lightning, can’t they? But instead of the moment of clarity and the giant syllables of truth, nothing but obscurity redoubled. Am I just too old? The new precisions tire my tongue, the old generalities leave me hungry; between the
indiscriminate
mystic welter and the loveless systems there must be words for my awareness of the material world and my perfect
continuity
with it. I am the form of the mutual sustaining of my cells; does that reduce me? I see the world, or parts of it, I drink parts of it, parts of it see me, it will drink me; I am not alone. The reasons of the heart have been endlessly rehearsed; those of the centre of gravity are voiceless; yet another night I leave them unspoken.’

Dark’s voice ceased, leaving him staring out over the blurred
treetops and tapping the rim of his glass against his teeth. A moth brushed across my face, leaving a trace of drowsiness. I shut my eyes and waited.

Nit stepped into my mind out of some vaguely rippling expanse. The harsh letters of her name, which like close-set bars had shut my imagination out of her life, now became as pliant as a curtain, or a lock of hair, to be set aside with one finger; the dot of its vowel floated up to be a moon over sudden depths of sleep.

When I opened my eyes again, Dark was lurching up from his chair, grasping at the table as he stood. The shadow of the house had shortened, and more of the garden was delivered over into incomprehensibility; each leaf was a silver lid over a black hole. Behind us, the house seemed to have become larger and hollower. Dark turned to go inside; he stood leaning forward with a hand on either side of the door, swaying, and peering in. Then he plunged through the skin of the room’s accumulated obscurity. I heard a crash in the hall, heavy uneven footfalls on the stairs; then a long silence. His voice fell from a window above my head: ‘Keys twisted by anticipation of difficult locks! Half my lifetime, filing and
hammering
, testing and laying aside! For a door that stands open!’

A lavatory cistern cried out overhead, and one among the black stems climbing the house was filled with whispers rushing to earth. By degrees a clarity was restored, through which I could read Dark’s stumbling on the stairs, clutching at a doorknob, opening a
refrigerator
, slamming it shut. I refilled my glass, and watched the
increasingly
convincing constructions of the moonlight.

Dark fell back into his chair. ‘… but we will not now leave our collection of ingenious keys; we are tired, dulled …’

Later he stirred again: ‘The earth rounds the sun in such a calm; why can we not keep our feet? What was it Marx said about philosophers and the world? “The problem, however …’”

‘The problem, however, is
to be part of it‚’ I suggested.

He swung his blurred face towards me with slow suspicion. ‘Plainly, your generation is
less fuddled. One can celebrate the actual, or live it unexamined … or leave it unexamined … or leave it …’

Dark was asleep. A quarter of a day must have passed since
sunset
, for the full moon had cleared the house, and stood directly over us.

Instruments of interrogation had been deployed against my return. Midgley seated me at the focus of an array of metal full of hungry eyes and round mouths toothed about with digits; here and there a precisely pointed tongue flickered in anticipation of my story. At my elbow a tiny oblong window gave onto a Pythagorean world of numbers tumbling in a greenish glow. In front of me clustered dials of different sizes, protruding on stalks or sunk like lilies into glassy surfaces; some bore upon their faces miniature replicas of t
hemselves
. I took it that I was facing lie-detectors of all degrees of
acuity
, that automatic pens were poised to scale the fevers of the imaginative faculty, that compass needles would unwaveringly point out anomalies produced by my buried selves in the magnetic field of truth. However, when Midgley had swung microphones on mechanical arms around my face, and had thrown a master-switch whose current convulsed the apparatus, but spared me, I was allowed to tell my tale without interruption.

Afterwards Midgley ran his eye along the reeled-out ribbon of numerical commentary. A little cross-checking enabled him to say, ‘I don’t believe you were carried on a pole.’

‘Perhaps that was a mere traveller’s tale‚’ I suggested. ‘On the
other hand, although such a mode of transport wouldn’t do for the city, it seemed quite natural for the jungle. I suppose your
contraption
didn’t believe the bit about the talking fish? I’d be interested to know if it thought I took all that slippery mud too personally. Maybe the sunset was in bad taste? There are other questions a machine like yours could usefully answer. To whose absence, for example, would it attribute my loneliness? The sense of defeat I found in Dark – was that a projection of my own hidden
forebodings
, or a reality evoked by the contrast of my unquenched
youthfulness
?’

But Midgley’s attention seemed suddenly to have turned inward, leaving his surface inert. Little flecks of music were drifting in from the enormous afternoon preparing outside. I freed myself from the dead circuitry and stood up to stretch. ‘Wake up, or we’ll miss the procession,’ I said, and stepped around him to the door. Some
connection
was restored in his interior; he seized a fat briefcase and ran after me down the stairs, crying, ‘I’ve remembered what it was I had to show you. You’ll be amazed!’

I stepped through the invisible surface separating the cool sharp wax-polish smell of the hallway from the sleepy erotic scents of the white and purple pyramids of blossom in the courtyard. Daytime fireworks were scattering noisy black stars above the rooftops. Midgley was waving a photograph before my eyes; it was a mere blur in the dazzle. ‘It’s your opium-dream,’ he cried, capering around me in triumph.

‘What do you mean? Taken by action-at-a-distance?’

‘No, I ran back here to collect the apparatus, and arrived at the opium-shop just as you were going under. You are the first person ever to have his dream photographed; I hope you don’t mind.’

‘I’ll tell you that in a moment,’ I said. At the corner of the crowded street stood a man holding a bush; while Midgley bought one of the leaf-shaped festival programmes impaled on its twigs, I
crouched in its shade to examine the picture. It was indistinct, but I could make out a naked girl, on a beach, grinning, and waving some blurred object. ‘What’s the innuendo in her hand?’ I asked. Midgley shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It’s your dream, you know.’

It was hot; I began to shout. ‘My most idle reverie has more
profundity
than this! It’s nothing but a dirty postcard from your own subconscious!’

Midgley twitched the thing out of my hands and gave me a reproving look. ‘You can’t argue with science, as I’m sure you will realize
upon reflection. My part in this was merely to clarify certain indications the layman might overlook, and which in fact
Persimmon
brought to my attention. Anyway she looks like the girl you danced with that night; it’s to be expected you should dream of her.’