rain also is of the process
- Ezra Pound [1]
Halfway through the conversation, I knew that I’d made a mistake.
I’d allowed him to get the better of me, just as he always does.
He was yammering on about his woes at work, as usual, and I guess it might just have been wanting to hear the sound of my own voice for a moment that made me blurt it out:
– I’ve retired.
Retired! It stopped him in his tracks, for once in a blue moon. He swallowed, looked puzzled.
Does not compute – my stupid cousin, so much younger than me, retired? I could see him working it out. Did he get fired? Is this just shorthand for ‘letting you go’, ‘freeing you up to seek other employment opportunities’? But then, how the heck could he retire? And where does that leave me?
– Well, congratulations ... I guess, he managed to crank out, finally, after much hemming and hah-ing, though you could see it almost killed him.
– Yeah, I decided that thirty years was long enough to spend in one place, doing one thing, so the next time they put round one of those ‘golden handshake’, ‘voluntary redundancy’ emails, I decided I’d take them up on it.
– But what are you going to do? How are you going to live?
– Oh, I reckon I’ll manage somehow. I mean, the mortgage is all paid off, and I do have some savings, too.
– But won’t you miss it? Being part of things, doing your job?
– Being a useful member of society, you mean? You don’t think there’s anything else I could do with my time?
– Well, what, for instance?
– None of your beeswax.
– I’m only asking for your own good. I mean, you’re nowhere near the statutory age. You’re younger than me, for God’s sake!
– Is that it? Is it the fact that I’m younger than you that sticks in your craw? Is it possible you might be just a tiny bit jealous?
– Jealous! Of you! I mean, it’s not like what you’re doing is so very important, not like ...
– Not like you, you mean?
– There’s really not much point in talking to you if you keep on interrupting. Not like saving lives or changing the world, I was going to say.
– Whereas you are ...?
– Certainly what I do is a lot more important than what you do, let’s face it. You may have the luxury of retirement, but some of us have to stay in place to keep standards up.
– You mean to block anyone younger from climbing the ladder?
– Yes. If they’re not up to the job. And most of these young ones quite frankly aren’t. If it weren’t for me being there, making sure that they don’t certify anything shoddy and risk people’s lives, then ...
– So you’re not at all happy for me?
– I didn’t say that. Quite the opposite, in fact. I can see how doing a job like yours could make you wonder what it was all for.
I had to admit he had a point. Librarianship may look pretty interesting when you’re young and keen and up for a challenge, but years and years of glorified data-entry and crowd control can get you down after a while. I wasn’t going to admit that to him, though. And so I did it, played right into his hands.
– If you must know, I’m going to write.
– You’re going to write? About what?
– About anything I want to.
– About your life, you mean? Are you writing a memoir? Thirty Years in the Stacks? Or some kind of novel? Confessions of a Randy Librarian? Put me down for a copy of that one.
– I might have known you wouldn’t get it.
– Get what? Your need for artistic self-expression?
– Well, yes, in a word.
– Don’t get me wrong, I like a good read as much as the next man – and I guess that someone has to write them. Political thrillers, celebrity memoirs ... people like Lee Child, Stephen King. But who’d want to read about you?
– I guess that’s what I’ll be finding out.
– But have you ever written anything before? Have you ever published anything? Outside the school magazine, that is?
He had me again. That’s the really horrible thing about talking to him. He knows me well enough to know all the chinks in my armour. I can’t get away with anything, because he’s been there all along – sneering and acting superior since we were both kids. If only my parents had just had the sense to move away from the rest of their families.
Above all, he could see how paper-thin were my claims to a hidden cache of published stories and newspaper articles. He knew what a cliché it was to dream – after all these years of reading and classifying other people’s published books – that I, too, might be able to join their select company.
By now he was in full spate:
– I’m only saying this for your own good. I know that you’ve been through a bit lately, enough to throw anyone off their game. But you really should think twice about this one – if it’s not too late already. Even if it is too late to get your old job back, I’m sure you could get another one. There are plenty of libraries, after all – more of them than there are rugby clubs, I reckon, and you know how I feel about that. You might not be able to get in at the same level you were at, but they’d probably be glad to have you. And if you can’t manage that, I could probably put in a good word for you. I do have some pals in business who can always use help with their software and information systems. That is what you do, isn’t it? Short of that, there are probably tech hotlines ...
– Get out.
– What?
– Get out of my house.
– You’re throwing me out?
– Yes.
– Just because you can’t stand to hear the truth from someone? After all, who’s going to tell you except me?
At this stage I got up and started to clear away glasses. He glared at me, cleared his throat once or twice – thought better of it, I suppose, or just couldn’t think of anything much to add – and dragged his great bulk out of the chair and out the door of the room.
I could tell that he was planning one of his old ‘turn-in-the-doorway-to-share-some-home-truths’ routines, but I’d been had that way before. I stayed out in the kitchen, crashing pots and pans, until I felt reasonably sure that he’d left.
I couldn’t help feeling that he’d won that round on points, though, despite the abrupt departure. He’d managed to get me to lose my cool, which would enable him to relay the conversation to other members of the family coven in terms of my ranting and raving like a madman as he tried to outline coolly and calmly the error of my ways.
Most significantly of all, however, he’d tricked both the ‘retirement’ and the ‘retiring to write’ admissions out of me, and would by now no doubt be repeating them to others replete with braying laughs and dismissive comments.
If he’d been a real person, I’d have been completely in the soup.
•
Not that it’s all untrue, by any means. I am a retired librarian (as of a couple of weeks ago). I do have obnoxious relatives whom I’m always trying to dodge. Yes, whom. I know it sounds a bit odd, but I did study English at university, and it just feels weird to me to leave a word in the nominative case when it should be in the accusative.
I hope I’m not one of those grammar nazis. It does rather come with the territory, I would admit, but then that’s really the problem. I didn’t actually have the conversation above, but I could have. It’s what’s been going through my head ever since I decided to bite the bullet and take the offer of a golden handshake before it became too late.
I have always wanted to write. And when I was a teenager, I did. Most of what I wrote then I never showed to anyone, and most of it’s been lost over the years – or even burnt in periodic spasms of self-loathing. But there are still a few ill-spelt, scrawled sheets here and there at the bottoms of boxes of other papers.
What was I trying to express back then? Angsty teenage musings, I suppose: the usual, in other words. I was always in love with some wondrous girl who wouldn’t have given me the time of day if I’d actually had the courage to approach her.
There’s an ominous absence of any who, when, where, how – let alone why – about the bits that I’ve dared to reread, though. Nothing about the issues of the day – no vivid word portraits of my sun-baked suburban childhood, or even of the rainwashed city streets that succeeded it.
Lots and lots and lots of stuff about books, though – imitations of my favourite crime and fantasy authors, musings on poems and song lyrics (and, yes, more attempted imitations of such).
‘Abnormally unpromising’ – that’s what Kingsley Amis said of his own juvenilia. If his was unpromising, mine was just downright bad. But you can’t shut up that inner monologue – that yammering voice at the back of your head that keeps on narrating your life back to you, and supplies you with interesting and insightful thoughts about the world as a whole and human behaviour within it which would probably turn out to be the merest commonplaces if you did ever try to bring them out into the light of day.
And, yes, I know I’ve already used that word ‘yammering’, in the description of my ‘cousin’s’ conversational style above. It’s a good word, and I’ve always liked it, but I suppose I might have to do something about that if I ever get round to correcting and tidying up all this tripe.
What can I say, though? It’s just not that easy to sit down in cold blood and turn on the inner voice. It’s been repressed for so long that it’s hardly audible to me. When I’m at the desk, that is. The moment I’m away from there it starts up again with the same litany of observations and insights. But where do you start?
After a few mornings sharpening pencils and staring at sheets of blank paper – just like they do in the movies when they haven’t yet had their big idea – I realised I was punching above my weight. How can I start off writing without knowing just what it is I’m trying to write?
How do you write a novel, or a short story? And as for your childhood memoir, do you begin in the womb? I was born in a small town in ... in the year of ...? Who the hell cares? That’s the problem. Unless you’re already a celebrity with a bad cocaine habit, you need to have some other reason to report to the world on your doings and sayings.
Are you a representative child of your place and time? Yes, that might do – but representative of what? Round and round and round your mind goes, gnawing and biting at you (my mind keeps on supplying me with apposite quotations right now: ‘In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald), or ‘The mind has mountains; cliffs of fall ... Hold them cheap / May who ne'er hung there’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins) ... Until you just give up and go and make yourself a cup of coffee instead.
But then I thought, why not do a course?
After all, you don’t have to look far to see advertisements for that kind of thing. Every time you open a magazine, they come flashing out at you: Write your long-cherished novel – Learn the tricks of bestselling writers – reasonable terms – taught by well-published professionals (But if they’re doing so well as writers, why are they spending their time correcting other people’s stuff instead of producing more of their own?)
Whatever the possible objections, it’s clearly a well-known thing. A lot of the writers you see being interviewed go on about studying writing at university – and some of them even mention Community College courses and night-classes. There’s no shame in it, in other words. And if you find you don’t know how to do a thing, why not do a course in it to find out?
Journaling. That’s one thing they seem to encourage. Keep a journal of your life and thoughts, just putting things down in the order they come to you – not sorting through it or censoring what you say too much.
Which is why I can say now that the cat just walked in with a pretty determined look on his face, obviously perturbed at the lack of the usual attention this morning. So instead of continuing with this, I’d better get up and feed him.
Just a hint, though: I did decide to do a course, after all. Hence the ‘dialogue exercise’ I started these notes with yesterday.
•
At first my main criterion was something based nearby. I had in mind a sort of neighbourhood community centre, with a circle of earnest learners grouped around some tweedy old guru who commented wisely and helpfully on each person’s draft.
But then, what do I know about it? Most of my information on the subject came from watching movies about the writing business. In Sullivan’s Travels, for instance, everyone uses a typewriter, and publishers and literary agents hang around like killer bees, waiting to seize on any drops of honey that fall from the anointed one (bit of a confusing metaphor there: sorry).
And then there’s that film His Girl Friday where the reporter manages to subvert the literary ambitions of his female sidekick simply by being such an ass than she can’t bear not to reform him somehow.
The common factor in both cases seemed to be a certain glamour surrounding the actual writing process which – inevitably – takes place entirely offstage. That is, with the sole exception of the home movie made by a group of bright young things in Evelyn Waugh’s early novel Vile Bodies. Their chosen subject, the life of John Wesley, founder of Methodism, is replete with scenes of ‘Wesley writing a sermon’ – five minutes of their main character scribbling on a piece of paper, with occasional ‘ha’s and ‘that’s it’s’!
It’s not that I didn’t research the subject. That is, after all, what I do – or rather, did. I looked up every afterschool programme, every university course, wrote away for curricula, compared fee structures. It was a very satisfactory way of wasting time, really, given the needle-in-a-haystack quality of any choice made amongst so many options.
I rejected the university courses, first of all. They looked sound enough, but were – for the most part – embodied in degree structures which forced you to start off virtually with remedial English classes before you could get to any honing of your craft (though of course I acknowledge that that latter might depend on having any actual craft to hone).
No, some more soup-to-nuts course was more the thing for me – one preferably not too much dominated by my sort of people: retirees, bored suburbanites, and other typical takers-of-an-improving-nightclass-for-a-few-weeks. That was certainly the target audience for most of the offers I came across in that section of the market.
Nor was cost to be discounted as a factor. The more glittering the promises on the brochure, the more hefty the fees appeared to be. The promises of introductions to agents, automatic preferential treatment by sympathetic publishers, and general VIP entry for successful alumni struck me as just so much soft soap. I’ve read enough writers’ memoirs to know that it’s better to lavish time on the product than on the admittedly tortuous process of getting it in front of other people’s eyes.
Finally, after I’d added ‘free’ to the set of mental provisos I’d been using to sort through all this junk, a set of course notes I didn’t remember even having written away for simply arrived in the mail one day.
Paths in the Forest. That was all it said on the front. And when I leafed through it, it certainly lacked the glitz and glamour of some of the other programmes. I suppose that I had originally envisaged choosing a course I could attend physically, making friends among the other students, going for coffee after lectures. All the stuff I remember from my own university days. That eager camaraderie.
This course was entirely via correspondence. There was no physical address listed – simply a PO Box number – so I couldn’t even feel positive that it was based in the same island as me. Did that matter? Well, not so much if there were no actual fees involved. You don’t have to batter down the door of an office if no pledges have been made on either side.
Nor did it promise enlightenment. I’d already been burned by one or two offerings which seemed to be offering tuition but were actually intended as fronts for offball religions of various kinds. I had no wish to be recruited – or even indoctrinated. It was one thing to have a teacher addicted to short, pithy sentences composed in the manner of Hemingway, or long wordy paragraphs modelled on Proust. It was quite another to be offered a surefire path to the jewel at the heart of the lotus.
Paths in the Forest.
So what was the forest? The forest of desires and complexities, with occasional clearings and even vantage points from which one could survey the whole. That, it appeared from their introductory material, was the meaning behind their metaphor.
The forest was Maya – the world of illusion. But it was also the world of everyday reality, with its warring motivations and tragic (and comic) outcomes. To hear them describe it, writing was simply a way of following, and occasionally, pioneering, new tracks through this insidious undergrowth.
It was an image that appealed to me strongly. I had, after all, been a keen tramper in my youth, and had beaten my way down most of the great tracks of my homeland, from the coastal walks of the north to the dense forests of the wild west coast. I had an immediate, visceral sense that the person who could write such a description might be the one best fitted to help me.
I mean, let’s face it, how was I to know? You have to make a leap sometimes, and your knowledge of what’s going to happen can never be complete. Even if I had known then where it would lead me, would I still have made another choice?
Perhaps. But it’s hard to regret the decision to leave behind those barren mornings, that shiningly white and reproachful blank sheet of paper. Say what you will about what happened, at least it was never dull.
And I suppose, in a way, it got me by a commodious vicus back round to where I wanted to be in the first place: typing out yet more sentences on pieces of paper to share my particular set of sensations with the world!
•
So wait a second here. If the first piece I included was a dialogue exercise, an imagined – i.e., not real – conversation with a presumably (though not so much as you’d hope) imaginary opponent; then the second piece must have been a section of journal, devised similarly according to various undisclosed parameters, but no doubt meant for some kind of course assessment. What, then, was the third piece you’ve just read?
It sounded – at the end, at any rate – as if it had been composed long after the events of the narrative it heralds. How can it, then, be part of the assessment for this much-bruited course? Was the prescribed exercise to compose just such a piece of suspenseful foreshadowing?
Little did he know, as he came to that fork on the mountain pass, that a moment’s delay there would have altered the course of his life ...Is that ever a permissible device? I know some novelists become addicted to it, and scatter it through their pages like confetti. Am I as desperate as that? (Of course you are, crows that chorus of voices offstage).
Well, it’s a roundabout story, I’m afraid, and unfortunately not one I can answer as easily as all that. Suffice it to say that there is some crossing of the timelines here. I am here and now (for all that good that does you, in some other here-&-now of your own), but I’m also there and then.
In other words, some of what I’m writing I’m writing right now, in full knowledge of the arc of my story, with an end in view (to borrow a phrase from Dryden – he’s dead; he won’t miss it). But not all of the writing presented here is like that. Some of it was written as course exercises, as I’ve intimated above – I suppose you’ve deduced by now that I did sign up for that course – and there are other pieces here which aren’t even by me.
In other words, I’m not the only character in my narrative, as you’ll no doubt be glad to hear. Nor am I even the only writer – as befits such a choice of subject-matter, I suppose. Nor have I even started on the real reason for all this rigmarole. It is a kind of memoir, yes, but – given that parts of it have been transposed into fiction – it also has elements of the autobiographical novel. What it’s actually about is something quite different, however.
My story is, quite literally, about life and death.
•
List your strengths and weaknesses as a writer.Some of you might be in a better position to do that for me than I am if you’ve persevered this far with my narrative.
That ‘weakness’ side was looking rather overwhelming when I’d finished adding all the various items that occurred to me over the next couple of days.
I’m not keen on writing long descriptions of things that don’t really interest me: ‘The room had large windows open to the south, with windowboxes full of blue gardenias, her favourite flower. The furniture, on the other hand, was largely hand-me-downs – a settee that had come from her grandmother, an ornate table and chairs donated by a distinctly pretentious aunt.’
Nor do I like mentioning people opening and closing doors, sitting in chairs, standing by the mantlepiece, and all the other things they might be expected to do as they go about their business. Cut to the chase, that’s my motto. But I’m forced to admit that doesn’t make me the ideal fit for a realist novelist.
Dialogue, too. I keep on remembering that adage attributed to the egregious Dr. Johnson: ‘Nothing can be easier than to write conversations. A question provokes a response, that response another. The problem is rather how to leave off than how to continue.’ Or words to that effect: the exact phrasing escapes me for the minute.
It’s very hard to avoid the effect of yourself talking to yourself when you construct such exchanges. While it’s true that they do fill the pages, making them pointed enough to convey information and character is not nearly so easy to do.
Descriptions, dialogue ... what else? Character! Yes. It’s easy enough to call your miserly neighbour Mister Scrimpnsave, and the drunken buffoon on the other side Tom Cheeryglug. It was good enough for Dickens, so it’s good enough for us. But as for those minutely observed types, those Mrs. Dalloways and Leopold Blooms from the great age of the novel around the turn of the century, what of them? Are such people no longer imaginable in our own era of pluralism? How can any writers now expect such close shared knowledge to be applied to the circumstances, beliefs and upbringings of the cardboard cutouts they create?
With problems such as these, what’s the point of even trying to become a writer? That was the unpleasant reality I was facing before I’d even been ‘assessed’ by the distant course-masters.
I’d decided from the beginning that honesty would serve me better than defensiveness. And yet, paradoxically, it’s far easier for a fearful soul to list deficiencies than strengths. What, then, were my strengths?
A huge amount of desultory reading, resulting in a stock of quotes and miscellaneous knowledge about this and that seemed likely to be one. But then I remembered Henry James’s conviction that a lifetime of watching – and analysing – French melodramas had equipped him to construct one of his own. He knew all the tricks of the trade, he was sure – but the boos of the rowdy audience on the first night of Guy Domville taught him otherwise.
Add it to the mix, though. After all, James went on to apply those same lessons, ‘the divine principle of the scenario,’ as he put it, to the series of increasingly taut and terrifying novellas and novels he wrote in the late 1890s.
More than just the tricks of the trade, and a quote for every occasion, I could (I thought) detect in myself a taste for the convoluted and self-questioning. The authors who spoke to me most clearly were those who went in for narratives half-glimpsed through the mirror of some other, more overt story. Writers such as François Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, James Joyce – confidence tricksters and prestidigitators, building elaborate altars so that the fire of heaven could descend elsewhere.
I wrote that down as a strength, also.
Which provoked a response. The first one which sounded like more than a pre-printed form letter, in fact.
There were, it appeared, no grades within this course – at any rate, not for the preliminary manoeuvrings necessary to assign you to a level within their labyrinth of options. But my answers to the questionnaire did appear to have passed muster.
How could they not? I wondered cynically. Perhaps the phrase ‘Diddle diddle dumpling my son John’ might have gone over just as well …
Nor had any last-minute demand for ‘administration’ fees suddenly appeared (or even been intimated) at this point, so I couldn’t but feel that all I was likely to incur was a waste of my time rather than any other resources.
The answer came by mail: a single typed line. It read:
You are hopeless.But then, on the back of the page, there was a seemingly disconnected, so therefore perhaps automatic phrase:
You have been accepted.There was also a printed brochure included with a series of details about how often I should post my exercises, how they should be formatted, and the kinds of responses I could expect.
I didn’t feel much better off as a result of all this self-scrutiny, but the mere fact of having an audience – if only an implied, essentially invisible auditor – somehow made the whole thing seem less futile.
Even being found ‘hopeless’ implied some kind of collective obstacle race which I had now, indubitably, entered. You can’t fail unless you actually try, and I felt for the first time that I was beginning to try.
After all, how many writers’ memoirs were full of accounts of those long steady years of grinding out novels for the desk drawer until your true voice appeared, one day, out of the blue – the magical tone of the first lines of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, sounding out clearly through the cacophony of Tom Sawyer’s childish antics.
It comes when you least expect it, that much was clear to me. And if you ignore it, there’s every chance that it will never come again. You have to be prepared to drop everything for the mere chance that this is the vital moment. Ye know not the day nor the hour (you are, of course, quite right to detect in me the lingering effects of early religious education), so you must be forever on guard.
I would not be found wanting. I would despatch my reports regularly to the address I’d been given. I would carry out my assignments religiously (there’s that word again) until that true voice should deign to manifest itself, be that early or late in the game.
•
My Best Friend
It was while I was still with Margaret, some ten years ago now. We’d driven out into the country to unwind a bit, something which always seemed to involve stopping at the maximum number of roadside fruit stalls (for her) and obscure vintage shops, particularly ones with a couple of shelves of books out the back (for me).
This stall was outside an orchard, so we were looking happily through trays of apples and stone-fruit when I saw a flash of white in one of the packing cases down behind the counter. What’s that? I asked without thinking (not like me to strike up a conversation without much previous calculation) ...
D’you want to see? Said the grinning young lady who seemed to be in charge of sales that day (I almost wrote ‘manning the stall,’ but I am trying to learn – albeit slowly – to purge my discourse of inappropriate archaisms).
I followed round to the back of the booth. There on the ground was an old wooden crate covered with a piece of brown paper. She lifted it off, and there they were: two lovely little kittens, one black and white and the other one raven black, lying asleep in each other’s arms.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen anything quite so beautiful, so peaceful and life-affirming, in all my born days.
– Oh my God, they’re just so cute! Margaret had joined us by now, and was standing, awe-struck, just behind me.
– Interested? Free to a good home! said the laughing teen.
– Are you sure? I said. I mean ... don’t you want to keep them?
– Nah. We might keep one of the other kittens, but these two are off to the SPCA if we can’t find someone to take them. This place is chock full of cats. We got dogs here, too. And horses.
– Well, if you put it like that. What do you think, Margaret?
– Do you even have to ask?
So, to make a long story short, the teen’s parents – a muddy but smiling pair – were duly summoned from whatever part of the property they’d been labouring in. It’s true that I had already been judging them somewhat, given that ominous mention of the SPCA, but they did seem to be genuine animal lovers, given the numerous questions they asked us to establish our bona fides.
And so we set out that day as a couple, footloose and fancy-free. We returned anxious fur-parents, me driving as slowly as I could to avoid exciting them too much. Faint chance of that! They were crawling round the floorboards the moment the engine started, with Margaret stuck in the backseat, trying to cuddle them into submission.
Many were the adventures along the way. Their first – painful – visit to the vet. They had to be seen separately, as that way they were just a bit turbulent: together they were uncontrollable.
There was the time that Toby (named after Tristram Shandy’s uncle – if you must know – because of the latter’s habit of constructing earthworks in the backyard) managed to get himself stung on the lip by a bee. Oh, a sorry young kitten was he that day! I can still see the look of shock and indignation on his face as it swelled and swelled. The vet said there was nothing to worry about, though, and sure enough he was right as rain next day – a little more cautious out in the garden perhaps? It’s hard to say. He certainly seemed as bumptious as ever.
They went wandering, got caught in other people’s basements, having slipped in like shadows when no-one was looking. They got drenched in thunder storms, crying and moaning under bushes (and, on one occasion, under the front wheels of the neighbour’s car).
Jane Eyre, the other kitten (named by Margaret after her favourite novel), was quite a wanderer. I guess – with unconscious sexism – I’d expected her to be the stay-at-home one, with Toby as the extravert. Not so, though. While he was very earnestly digging out in the garden, his little white bum waving around in the air, she would be slinking around the neighbourhood, going into shops to greet the customers, even having to be brought back home by anxious neighbours on more than one occasion.
Which was quite prophetic, really. Because as our problems and arguments increased, it became more and more apparent that Margaret and I were not going to work longterm. It didn’t seem to matter how much effort we put into it – after each awkward (but heartfelt) reconciliation, next day we’d back at it again, a nightmarish round of suspicions and accusations. We just didn’t fit together.
So when she decided to take up another job, in another city, elsewhere, a little black cat went with her.
Toby was definitely in mourning for his sister and constant companion for quite some time after that. My heart had belonged to him since that day by the orchard, but I hadn’t thought that degree of emotion could actually increase.
But when I saw him wandering around the house, checking under cushions, meowing at closed doors, I felt so powerless to help him. If he’d got plenty of cuddles before, he got far more of them now. At first he resisted a bit (holes to dig, places to go, vermin to pursue), but after a while he seemed to get reconciled to it.
He became my little shadow – jumping in the warm spot the moment I got up from bed or from a chair, breaking the silence with a constant litany of meowed conversation (that is, after all, what they tell us it is: cats don’t talk like that to each other, only to humans).
And so it has remained. I suppose you could say that I’ve used him as a kind of excuse for not getting back on the horse: frequenting the singles scene, trying out dating. But we understand each other, Toby and I. He knows how to shape his day into a satisfactory form. It’s more of a choice of places to nap than places to dig in, now, as he attains maturer years, but his cheeky little face has remained much the same.
He’s suspicious of strangers, but also fascinated by them. On the rare occasions I have a visitor, he’ll sit somewhere nearby, sizing them up, refusing to come to them, but intensely interested to see what they’ll do next.
I love him and I believe he loves me too.
I know people say that it’s just cupboard love. That if I dropped dead and the food stopped appearing, it wouldn’t be long before he was gnawing on my leg. That may well be, but I wouldn’t grudge him that.
It doesn’t change the fact that he always wants to be where I am, that he presses his little furry body up against me at night, and relies on me if loud noises – such as those thrice-cursed firework displays! – are going on somewhere near.
I don’t know if he sees me as a parent, a brother, or another errant kitten, but we constitute a party of two. If he were ever to be taken from me I’m not quite sure what I would do. He constitutes my greatest hostage to fortune, the thing whose loss would make nonsense of everything else that remains.
•
It was with a certain trepidation that I submitted my first couple of exercises. There was a rough word-length (1,000 words +/– 10%), and a suggested topic for each, but little else in the way of information about just how they should be approached.
Nor could I quite see the relevance of the writing samples supplied. There was one about two Victorian ladies wandering through the gardens of Versailles which was certainly atmospheric, but I couldn’t quite see how it amounted to a treatise on friendship, exactly.
But perhaps that was the point? Perhaps it was the underlying message of all these minutely detailed accounts of the grounds, in all their creepiness? Mr. Eliot calls it the ‘objective correlative’ – describing a thing in order to evoke a certain emotion somehow mysteriously associated with that thing, without ever mentioning the emotion itself?
In that case, the piece could be about friendship simply because that feeling is never named.
I suppose that I had a pretty clear idea of what I was expecting in the way of response. One had to wait quite a while for that to be supplied – presumably because of the difficulty of getting around to all of the exercises produced by so large a clientele.
That is, if there were any other clients. The materials I’d received so far implied that they’d been prepared for a large general audience, but that could have been simply an assumption on my part. But why else would anyone go to so much trouble for a single recipient?
I could anticipate the direction of the critique so clearly that I’d practically supplied it myself by the time the actual notification arrived. ‘Don’t intrude ideology into your piece, by going off at tangents’ – ‘Clarify the exact ways in which your love for your pet relates to your relationship with your former partner’ ...
The message I actually received appeared to relate to both of the texts I’d submitted. At any rate it didn’t differentiate clearly between them. Nor was there any clear evidence within it to establish that either had actually been read. For all I could tell, it could easily have been manufactured in advance. In the interests of full disclosure, though, I’ll copy it here:
- The charting and disclosure of pain is the principal task of the creative artist. You have made a start upon that road.
- Press on the points one by one till you find all those that hurt.
- Your best friend is your worst enemy because they can mask and divert that pain. In that sense, since their continued life is your joy, their absence or death may serve you better. The degree of your love for them is to be measured solely by your suffering at their loss.
- Your worst enemy is your best friend. Their blundering and offensive remarks and actions cut through the integuments of your soul. Cultivate their society till you reach the limits of your endurance. Going past that will open up the true road.
- As is to be expected at this stage, you have failed to grasp the fuller dimensions of either task, and have not penetrated the clues which have already been given. Your stupidity and obstinacy are to be praised, though, as they mean that you may still be capable of being hurt into learning.
‘Being hurt into learning’ – ‘the integuments of your soul’? It sounded like a load of occultist gibberish to me, and yet it did seem to relate – vaguely – to some of what I had written about my cousin and my cat: not to mention about ‘Margaret’ …
I promise to stop now with the inverted commas around assumed names – I just thought I’d throw a few in to remind you that most names and details have been changed to shield the innocent – and the guilty, for that matter – not that I’m sure that this is my story, exactly, but whoever’s it is, I seem to be the one telling it, and so I do have to preserve some decorum in how it’s approached.
But the strange thing is that it all made a certain sense to me. I had been writing to exorcise certain irritations and painful memories. And there was a sense of relief in airing them even in this very controlled (and hopefully completely private) context. The fact that they were out there on paper somehow made it possible to manipulate the details as if they were separate from myself. It made those occasions objective, outward phenomena – rather than burning, still-open wounds.
Again, I couldn’t persuade myself that there was no more to be learned by pursuing this particular path. There did seem to be certain insights forthcoming – admittedly more from my experience of the writing than from any of the comments I’d so far received on it.
But the mere fact of writing for somebody else’s eyes seemed to free me up to be more self-critical, to judge the possible effect of certain word-choices, locutions, on that other, inevitably idealised reader. Someone who was, in some sense, myself, and yet – in another way – emphatically wasn’t.
Oh God, I can hear myself saying it: ‘if only I had known ...’
•
I was quite proud of the next few stories I submitted, I must admit.
Course politics! If you think you’ve divined the direction of your teacher’s interests, it makes sense to provide material which seems to match them. Séances and hauntings were all we’d really encountered in most of the readings so far – talk about The Haunted Study!
I’d always heard that the bourgeois novel depends on wills and adultery for its very existence. But this course seemed dedicated to the proposition that the living were simply figures caught in a waiting room in transit to the tomb.
Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nikolai Gogol – these (apparently) were the great figures it behoved us to study. I’d hardly even heard of Hoffmann, though I had read some stories by the other two.
Which raises the question whether tempering your style and subject matter to fit someone else’s tastes really constitutes learning, or just an advanced case of sycophancy? By now, though, my major focus had shifted elsewhere.
I remember once seeing a girl in the library slip a small piece of paper into the pages of the book in front of her. Alert to the possibility of nefarious activity of some kind, I strolled over to her table all casual-like.
The book was handwritten – I managed to see that much before she turned round in her seat to face me.
– You’re wondering what I’m doing, I suppose.
I was wearing my little librarian’s badge, or else my attempts at snooping might have looked more suspicious.
– Is that a journal you’re writing in?
– Right in one. It is, yes.
– I’m sorry. I have to ask. What was that you just slipped into your book?
– Oh, it’s not a piece of priceless manuscript, if that’s what you’re thinking. Here, take a look for yourself.
She held up the book to me, wide open, her thumb held hard on the crack in the spine. As I took it from her, I saw an old playing card.
– A card?
– Yes. I found it by the entrance outside. I always pick them up and put them straight into my diary.
– Always? Has it happened more than once?
– It happens all the time! See for yourself ...
Since her gesture implied that I was free to leaf through her book, I proceeded to do so, trying hard not to read too much of what was written there.
What I saw were playing cards. Other cards, too – business cards, logos, but mostly the scruffy, multi-sized remnants of a series of dismembered decks.
– Is somebody leaving them for you?
– Oh no. At least, I don’t think so. They just seem to ... happen.
– Do they mean anything? The numbers. Do you check them? Are they sequential, significant?
– I used to, yes. I spent ages looking through astrology and numerology books. But now I just pick them up and keep them. I don’t actually think they have any real significance at all.
– But what would happen if you stopped picking them up?
– I think that they’d just stop happening. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe something bad would happen. I don’t really think so, but it doesn’t seem worth taking the risk. So I just pick them up and keep them in here.
– Have you discussed it with anyone?
– With a doctor, you mean? Or perhaps a priest? No, you’re the first. Nobody’s ever shown an interest before, and I don’t show my diary to anyone else.
Blushing, realising that I’d held onto to it for far too long, I shut her notebook and handed it back to her.
– Sorry. Here’s your book back.
– Not at all. I asked you to look through it, after all.
– I have to say, I’ve never in my life seen a playing card lying by itself on the ground, let alone picked it up.
– Now you will.
And do you know, she was right. A couple of days later, walking down a footpath in a strange part of town, I saw a playing card lying right there in front of me. And, like her, for fear of some consequence if I didn’t, I picked up the card and tucked it into my own notebook.
It never happened again, but it did seem a bit beyond casual coincidence.
It’s very tempting to make the girl in the library Margaret, and turn the whole thing into some sort of fateful mating ritual, but that might sound a bit cheesy. In fact I never saw her again. Perhaps she regretted sharing so much of her secret with someone she’d never met before. Or perhaps she was never really there at all.
The bit about the cards is true, though. Which (I suppose) was why I was pre-primed to find significance in the little things that had started to happen by then.
The first one was innocuous enough.
I had a storeroom downstairs where I kept the overflow from my book collection, as well as a lot of other odds and ends. When I went down there one morning, I found that the lightbulb had busted.
It wasn’t that it had simply stopped working. There was broken glass scattered all over the floor, as if someone had simply walked into it by mistake and cracked it off its base.
Well, that can happen, of course. I managed to unscrew the jagged remains of the bulb, and replace it with another one.
It worked well enough – at first – but a couple of days later I came down and found that the same thing had happened again.
After that scarcely a day went by that I didn’t find something disturbed or misplaced down there – a handful of change scattered over the floor, a set of books turned backwards, with their spines facing inwards. It was a fairly low-key version of what I’d always been taught were the signs of a poltergeist haunting.
I’d read enough on that subject to know that paying attention to such things tends to give them oxygen. One can be better off shutting off the area and disturbing it as little as possible.
So that’s what I did. It wasn’t exactly sealed off from the world, but I did lock the door, and hang the key in my study upstairs where nobody was likely to find it.
After that, things started to get a bit more serious.
•
I’ve always been a vivid dreamer. At least, so I suppose. I usually wake up with the impression of a number of overlapping dreams, of immense significance at the time, but fading into nothingness as I try to grasp at the details.
The exceptions have been those dreams which I saw even at the time as important. One vital dream of reconciliation and forgiveness at the worst moment of a break-up ... another dream which had me working at an improvised animal shelter, cuddling up to poor, abused cats, just before I made the vital decision to retire from my job (‘herding cats’ – get it?).
Now, however, the cumulative effect of the dreams I was having – and mostly remembering in detail next morning – was rapidly getting out of hand. I’ll give you one example:
I was walking down a dark street flanked by tall, overarching ruins. It looked a little like some of the pictures I’ve seen of London after the Blitz – bricks spilled out across the road, void areas of darkness alternating with the fronts of the buildings.
There was somewhere urgent I needed to be, but every turn I chose seemed to take me further away from it. I had an immense, almost overwhelming sense of anxiety at the back of my mind. I wanted to get there – wherever that was – yet my chances of doing so were clearly leaking away with each passing moment.
At length, after an indeterminate time of walking, passing what looked like the same buildings again and again – as if, every time, I was missing some crucial turn – I saw a lone figure standing right in front of me.
She was white as a ghost, shrouded in diaphanous fabric, and with a thin, pinched face. It was hard to determine her age. She might have been young or old, though her face had no obvious lines.
– Can you help me? I asked her, as soon as I got near enough.
She didn’t seem to hear me – at any rate she didn’t respond. By now I could see that her arms, folded in front like a sleeper, or an Egyptian mummy, were holding a sheaf of papers. As I came up to her, her arms flopped down, releasing the papers like a shower of confetti.
My first instinct was to clutch at them, prevent them from falling. I managed to grab a sheet or two, but when I looked up, she was gone.
That wasn’t the end of the dream, though. It’s hard to convey how desolate and barren that maze of buildings and blind alleys seemed to me – how lost and cold they made me feel. What I saw on the paper in front of me was worse, however.
You see, that was the truly surprising thing about this dream, and about many others I had at this time. Usually, in the past, I’d woken up with vague impressions and a few images from my nightly dream journeys. Sometimes I dreamed of composing long poems, or writing down stories – all that would be left of them in the morning would be (at most) a phrase or a word.
Now, I’d wake up with an almost eidetic memory for details. In this case, for instance, the sheet of paper in my hand was so vividly with me when I woke up from sleep, that I could reproduce it almost line for line, even in the harsh light of morning.
Not that I can draw, you understand. My sketches were crude approximations, scribbled down quickly before the picture could fade. It didn’t fade, though. It was as if it were inscribed on some kind of mental tablet, available there for consultation as I rubbed out and redid the details I’d seen – and still, it seemed, saw.
So what the hell did that mean? It looked like some kind of city map. Or perhaps, given its apparently three-dimensional nature, a subway diagram might be a better analogue.
I couldn’t make head or tail of the directions, or categories, though of course I’d seen such things before in esoteric literature about tarot cards or – for that matter – in W. B. Yeats’s book about the séances he had with his wife.
What did it have to do with me, though? The context made it seem like a map to the streets I’d been trying to find my way through in the dream, but if that was what it was, why was it not a more conventional A-to-Z street grid? I had, after all, been walking around in circles. I hadn’t observed any accessible bridges or tunnels.
And, if it had nothing to do with that, if it was simply a memory of something I’d once seen in a book or a poster, why couldn’t I locate it anywhere? None of the research I did turned up anything particularly analogous, though I did learn quite a bit about the strange, esoteric art of mapping the afterlife.
I guess that most of us are reasonably familiar with the Christian notion of Hell, located below our feet, Earth, here at ground level, and Heaven, up there in the sky. The most thorough conceptualisation of this is probably in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the whole thing is given a local habitation and a name (or series of names).
You’ll note that Dante has his pilgrim enter hell from a ‘dark wood’ somewhere in the environs of Jerusalem, pursue his way down through the levels to the centre of the earth, where a three-headed Satan sits munching away on the bodies of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot, then climb through a tunnel all the way to the antipodes, where Mount Purgatory allows him to climb up through the atmosphere and into the changeless, ethereal realm of the planets.
It’s not, I’m sure, that Dante meant this dream geography to be taken entirely literally (though perhaps he thought some aspects of it might be, in some sense, ‘real’). Subsequent readers and commentators had a less nuanced view, however, and something resembling this is still at the roots of many Christian beliefs.
But there are many other maps and models of the Afterlife!
The oldest one I’m personally aware of is an Egyptian chart of the underworld, showing the subterranean passages your boat of immortality must take before ending up before the judge of souls, who will weigh your heart on a scale against the feather of truth, Ma’at.
If the two balance, you will become the reborn god Osiris; if not, your soul will be devoured by hungry crocodile monsters.
Emanuel Swedenborg, the great scientist turned mystic, had his own model of the afterlife complete with false – and true – heavens, angels, demons, and the rest of the Christian panoply. He claimed, however, to have visited all of these places personally (under angelic protection, obviously) and thus to be authorised to bring back authentic details of their constitution.
There are Mormon models of the Afterlife; Theosophist ones, Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu ones; there’s also the Classical Elysian Fields, with Cerberus, the River Styx, the Asphodels, and Islands of the Blest.
Then there’s the account in Plato’s Republic of the dead man, Er, who came back to life to report his progress through a dark tunnel into a place of judgement where souls are chosen to go on into the light or to go back to earth through reincarnation.
It wasn’t a subject I’d ever paid much attention to previously. I was brought up by two agnostic parents, who duly ‘exposed’ me to services at various churches on the offchance that one of them would take. Unsurprisingly, given the somewhat clinical nature of this procedure, none of them did.
Now, however, my dreamlife seemed to have far more in common with the visionary journeys I was reading about in Swedenborg or Thomas de Quincey than with the more standard anxiety or wish-fulfilment dreams I’d experienced in the past.
•
I’d grown accustomed by now to the loud creaking noises above my head – in the empty crawlspace our real estate agent had described to us as an ‘attic’ – which ramped up after lights out each evening.
Nor, I’m quite sure, were they solely in my mind. Toby looked up, too, when he heard them, and cuddled up even more closely to my side if (as happened occasionally) they persisted.
Nor could I blame the ever more frequent presence of dead birds around the perimeters of my property on him. He was, by now, too retired and sedentary a hunter to cause such havoc.
They tended to appear during the night, too. I could clearly establish that fact from my new habit of beating the bounds before bed every night.
The property was generally clear of them then. Next morning, though, a couple of melancholy bundles of feathers – mostly blackbirds – were generally to be found.
‘A fixed opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.’ So said William Blake.
It was hard for me to formulate any clear opinion on this confusing tangle of events. Was the house haunted? Had it been built near a midden, or a graveyard of some kind? If so, why had these manifestations waited so long to declare themselves?
The inevitable connection with the course of studies I was pursuing was not, of course, entirely absent from my mind. Had my brooding on the subject matter and requirements of the increasingly odd assignments sensitised me somehow to such matters, ‘opened the interior eye’ – as Sheridan Le Fanu warns can happen to those who indulge too much in such unhealthy stimulants as green tea?
It seemed hard to believe, but objectivity was becoming a state of mind increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of such strange (and for me unprecedented) incidents and events.
Then, one morning, the worst thing imaginable happened. Toby was not there beside me when I woke up.
Admittedly, this had – occasionally – occurred previously. Sometimes he needed to go out in the night, and would generally come in with some loud meowing when he heard breakfast preparations beginning inside.
Not this time, though. The long day wore on and he did not appear. He was, of course, wearing a collar with his name and address, and I hoped against hope to receive a call or even a visit about him.
It hadn’t happened for a long time, but certainly in his youth he’d had a bad habit of secreting himself in dark, I suppose to him easily defensible, spaces, some of which turned out to be located in other people’s basements or sheds!
If that had happened again, it might be a day or two before he came home. Which is easy to say, but not so easy to endure.
By the end of the week I’d put flyers on every nearby telegraph pole, knocked on every neighbour’s door. Nothing. I couldn’t help feeling responsible somehow. Everything had seemed fine with him until this spate of uncanny occurrences erupted.
I wondered, too (amazing how the mind wanders) if the fact that I’d written about him, and posted my exercises to the address I’d been given, had somehow opened him up to harm – if, for instance, that had had the effect of making him somehow visible to those who should not have been allowed even to know of his existence?
It seemed a distinctly offbeat conjecture, but could my own writings have contributed in some way to this unparalleled catastrophe?
•
Does what you write shape, or influence, reality? Does it actually have an ‘objective correlative’ in the physical world? What is the nature of the imagination’s influence on the cosmos?
All I know is that once I started to write about things that go bump in the night, things started to go bump in the night.
Then, when I shifted track to writing about my cat, he started to show classic anxiety symptoms – then went missing altogether.
The King in Yellow. It’s an old book of stories by an obscure American writer called Robert W. Chambers, much admired by H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. The idea of the main narrative is that there’s a book so depraved, so dangerous, that anyone who reads it is irrevocably damned – or driven insane – one of the two, I don’t remember. Possibly both.
We’re never allowed to know just what is so wrong with it, since if we did, presumably the same thing would happen to us …
Could simply signing up for a course, exercising your imagination in unexpected ways, have a similar effect? A rationalist would sneer at so simplistic a notion, and I have to say that it took me some time to get up the courage even to admit to myself that I was beginning to believe it.
But then, in a world where physicists solemnly tell us that no objective phenomenon can be recorded without some influence from the observer – not just Schrödinger's cat or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but also the now universally acknowledged contaminating effect of an anthropologist-in-residence on the structures of the ‘primitive’ societies they’re there to examine – it’s hard to maintain that position with any real conviction.
Psychosomatic symptoms are as ‘real’ and ‘significant’ as those caused by bacterial or viral infection – or so the Doctors tell us. Could I somehow be creating the effects I was experiencing simply by expecting them?
It’s hard to observe yourself observing yourself, and yet that’s what such a proposition entails: roughly the mental equivalent of the Red Queen’s setting out to believe seven impossible things before breakfast.
But the problem went deeper than that. It wasn’t my conscious expectations which were really in question – it was the power of the unconscious mind manifesting itself in my everyday reality. The only real alternative to that was to suspend my disbelief in the existence of external spiritual agencies acting upon the world of appearances.
By observing a thing you make it a conscious reality, and thus render moot its ability to affect you subliminally. And yet, if you don’t observe it, you’re left solely with a series of increasingly baffling symptoms. Where’s Sigmund Freud when you really need him? (Though actually, in a case of this kind, it might be more to the point to have Dr. Carl Gustav Jung).
In any case, the dreams continued. The whey-faced woman with the billowing robes – like some figure from a de Quincey opium vision – continued to manifest in the frustrating mazes I explored each night: bombed-out cityscapes; underground sewer-systems; gleaming, ore-heavy caves.
Now, however, I had a friend by my side. Toby the cat had become my Virgil, guiding me through these various labyrinths, though never quite to their heart. He never spoke. Even in dreams, he retained his catitude (to coin a term), had not become some super-cat, some quintessence of felinity. But it’s not hard to read a companion you’ve known for so many years.
I longed to know if he was simply a projection of my sleeping mind. But I suspected it meant he was no longer in the land of the living – that one of the myriad dangers which threaten the safety of the small and powerless had finally caught up with him. I didn’t doubt that he’d faced it with his usual blind courage, paying no heed to the sheer casual power of his adversary, be it machine or animal. I’d seen it many times before, after all – Toby launching himself at an oversized opponent, refusing ever to acknowledge himself outmatched.
I only prayed that he hadn’t been frightened. I tormented myself imagining him meowing for help, the help which had always come in the past, and feeling, in his last moments, betrayed by the one who loved him most.
None of this showed, however, in the sleek presence beside me, darting from shadow to shadow in the relentless underworld of my dreams. I took great comfort from him, but – again – couldn’t but suspect that he was delaying his own onward passage by offering help to me at this darkest of times.
•
So why not simply give up the course? Admit defeat in these foolish, inflated hopes of finding ‘something to say’ which might appeal to others? ‘Expressing myself’ – in the most banal of ways?
I wasn’t a member of some significant minority or interest group – I had no propagandistic or educational intent. Why, then, bother to speak at all? Les hommes moyen sensuels – more sensual than intellectual, the middle-of-the-road people – already had more than their fair share of mouthpieces.
Easier said than done, I’m afraid. I wrote what I considered a firm but courteous withdrawal letter, and sent it complete with stamped, self-addressed envelope to the PO Box number I’d been given. It was sent back: not known at this address.
Apart from including my letter as an attachment to my latest assignment, there seemed to be no way to subvert this roadblock.
But the letters kept coming from them, regardless of my decision to stop participating in the course. And I kept on dreaming my labyrinthine dreams. And, I was glad to see, not every night but most nights, my furry companion accompanied me, with hints, on occasion, from the woman in white.
•
I awoke this morning from troubled dreams to find that the house had been broken into during the night.
I hadn’t really thought of myself as a deep sleeper before now, but clearly I must be. I didn’t wake up, despite all the things they took and the amount of time it must have taken them.
It’s not that there was really that much to take: the usual household items, dishes and furniture. All of it was gone this morning, though: just the sink and the light fittings left in the living room. Even the lightbulbs were gone.
There was one stroke of luck, though. I’d been up late leafing through my course materials to date, and had fallen asleep with the folder under my pillow. That was still there, along with all of my writings so far.
Which is really more of an unpleasant irony than a genuine blessing, given my profound doubts about the value of all this introspection. I mean, what good does it do sharing your doubts and fears with a world which has no real interest in you?
A long time ago, when I was still a respectable householder, I purchased a small safe to keep my most valuable possessions secure. It had my passport, birth certificate and other mostly personal items in it. I hadn’t thought of it or used it for quite a long time. It was small enough to fit in one of the upper cupboards.
Sure enough, it was gone, too. Clearly they hadn’t bothered to try to open it on the spot, but had simply carried it out with all the other things.
Besides that, they’d been very neat. The flat now looked as though it belonged to a monk. I wasn’t sure if I didn’t prefer it that way, to be honest. Just a scattering of sand over the floor where they’d tromped in and out.
At first I wondered why so much sand, then remembered the plant boxes outside – another relic of that far-off period of domesticity.
When I rang the police, they were politely non-committal. There’d be an officer around in ‘due course,’ they claimed – though it sounded as if that was unlikely to be in the next couple of hours. Or days, for that matter.
– You have to remember that we have quite a lot on our plate nowadays, the operator reminded me. It’s not that we don’t take your crime extremely seriously, but it may take rather longer than we would like to come round and take your statement.
Which reminded me that all of my insurance documents were in the safe, too.
Not to mention my photo albums, old letters, and other mementoes.
When I came to think of it, I hadn’t really been out of the flat for some weeks now. I used to take regular walks round the park, but some rough characters had taken to hanging around by the wooded edges of the football field, and they were prone to call out and make rude gestures whenever I walked by.
Nor, in my retired state, could I afford a car any more.
Had I actually become a shut-in? I mean, I never actually had that conversation with my ‘cousin’ I started off these notes with – it was all imaginary. I hadn’t seen him for ages. Had he simply stopped visiting without me noticing?
The second strange thing took place later that day, in the early evening.
A knock came at the door. I rushed over to open it, convinced that it was the police come at last. Not that I exactly relished admitting to them just how lax my security had been – how hopeless any prospect of recovering the thieves’ takings. But it would be some kind of human contact: some acknowledgement of my sacred right to breathe in air and occupy some small part of our planet.
But it wasn’t them. Instead, it was an efficient-looking young woman, with a clipboard in her arms, and the determined expression of a practised knocker-on-doors.
– Yes? I asked. A bit curt, I suppose, but it was a bit of a surprise.
– You’ve experienced a break-in?
– Yes, I have. Are you with the police?
– Not directly, no. But we do work with them.
– You’d better come in, then.
– Thank you. I’d be delighted.
That seemed to strike a bit of an odd note. Was I letting in trouble? Memories of all those books and movies where inviting someone to cross your threshold gave them free entry thereafter crossed the back of my mind. Only to be rejected summarily. Not someone so neat and prosaic as this young lady!
– I’m afraid that there’s really nowhere to sit. You see, they took most of my furniture. There’s a chair in the bedroom, that’s all.
– That’s fine. I’m happy to stand.
– Would you like a glass of water? The faucet still runs, and I still have a couple of cups.
– Yes, thank you, that would be lovely. It’s rather dry and hot out there.
And so it was. As I looked out the window, I could see just how bad the drought had been this year. The grass was dry straw, and the exposed earth on the verges was crumbling to dust.
– We could certainly do with some rain.
– But there won’t be any.
– Excuse me?
– I mean that it will stay hot and dry out there just as long as you’re here.
– I don’t understand. Do you mean that you think I’m causing it somehow?
– Isn’t that what you think? That’s what it says here, anyway.
– That’s what it says where?
– In my notes on your case.
– My case. What case?
– Your burglary.
– Oh, I see. Did I say that to the lady on the phone? I don’t remember doing that, I must admit.
– You didn’t say it, but you have been toying with the idea: that what you think changes what happens to you.
– How on earth could you know that? Just who are you, anyway? You’re not with the police!
– I never said I was.
– You said that you were connected with them, though.
– Did I? I don’t think so. I think I said that we work with them: specifically, that we pool information from time to time.
– You mean they’re just giving out information to any Tom, Dick or Harry?
– If you like, yes. That’s exactly what they’re doing. And in exchange, we’re sharing our own information with them.
– I think you’d better leave.
– Can I finish my glass of water?
– No, I think you’d better just go.
– That could be unwise. I have things to tell you which you really need to know at this stage in the process.
– I’m not interested in anything you could have to say to me. When the police do come I’m going to make it pretty clear just what I think of them sharing my data with some neighbourhood group.
– But that’s just the point ...
– Just leave!
And so she did, ostentatiously finishing her water first, then looking around for somewhere to put it down, then finally sidling out the front door with a slightly regretful look on her face.
I was all prepared for a smirk: the usual expression of the young and attractive in any interaction with the old and poor. But I couldn’t persuade myself that I’d seen one. It was twilight by now, and she seemed to evaporate into the shadows the moment she’d gone out the door.
Leaving me to an evening of futile regrets. Why hadn’t I agreed to hear her out? It mightn’t have taken long, and I could have got some real clues as to what was actually happening to me. Was she somehow connected to the writing course? How else could she have known about my suspicions about how directly my thoughts were influencing the world around me? It was not the kind of idea you share with people you don’t know, and even in the state of agitation I’d been in at the time, I couldn’t imagine myself mentioning it to the police receptionist who answered my phone call.
But I hadn’t been agitated. That was the point. I should have been, but I wasn’t. It all seemed inevitable somehow. As if I’d simply been waiting for it to happen – and accepted it as the next step in the process as soon as it did.
•
My dream last night was far less spectacular than some of the Piranesi cityscapes I’ve been wandering through over the past couple of weeks. It was almost as if the damage had now been done: whatever bewilderment they were meant to accomplish (the ‘dreamwork’ – as Freud calls it) had finally achieved its intended results.
My memory of it seemed clearer this morning when I woke up, too – not the usual sense of clouds of imagery and intertwined narratives fading away like fog when the sun rises.
I was lying on some kind of hospital bed in a vast, echoing space. I couldn’t really see anything, but my position there was not uncomfortable. There was a certain feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, though.
After a while, I began to become conscious of some voices talking nearby. They’d been doing so for some time before I started to focus in on the fact that I could hear at least some of what they were saying. It sounded a bit like one of those highbrow radio programmes which broadcast dialogues between the great and the famous on stereotyped issues of the day.
It’s hard to be precise, but there seemed to be two main voices, with another one playing the role of a compère or referee. Again, it sounded like a public debate of some kind, only this one seemed more intimate than that: like a conversation between close colleagues where much of what is actually meant is conveyed by small shifts in tone or choice of words.
I don’t know how long it went on for. It didn’t really appear to have been resolved when I woke up – but then, I may have missed the most important portions. Nor am I really sure if I was meant to overhear it at all.
What I can remember went something like this:
Voice 1: ... in that case, we may have to resort to more radical action.
Voice 2: Really? Isn’t that a little premature?
[My impression of these two voices is that the first sounded harsher and more masculine than the other. The second, I concluded after a while, might well have belonged to the young woman who had visited me to discuss my ‘case’, and whom I’d so rudely, in retrospect, dismissed. Whether it was or wasn’t her, it certainly seemed more placatory and forgiving than the first one].
V1: Hardly premature. We’ve allowed a most elaborate build-up of shadow realities around him. Nor have we emphasised the contradictions underlying his continued residence.
V2: But it’s strange to him still. It’s natural for him to bolster up a sense of self with virtual props.
[‘Him’, I assumed, was me. Of course I could have been wrong, but it just seemed unlikely that anyone else’s ‘case’ was likely to be under discussion under such carefully staged circumstances].
V2: [continuing]: After all, we haven’t really tried to break through and actually talk with him.
Another Voice: Except for your visit.
V2: Yes, but that could hardly have been expected to resolve the deadlock. It was understandable that he would maintain the circumstances of the fiction we’ve allowed him to sustain.
V1: I’m opposed to such fictions in general – particularly in cases like these. What can one make of a mind who can actually type out citations from Swedenborg, and still refuse to acknowledge their application to his own case?
V2: That it’s a normal human mind, shielded against realities which might have blasted it at birth?
V1: Shielding can only go so far. At a certain point harsher consequences are bound to break through, and I’ve never believed that delays with that can do any good. In any case, we’ve tried it your way, and the results have been largely discouraging.
V2: I don’t see that at all. Analysis of the notes shows larger recognitions on the point of taking form at any moment. How could anyone conceive of such narrative excursuses who wasn’t aware, on some level, of their underlying validity?
V1: What you see as encouraging I see as evasive. The point at issue now is what to do next. The sands have started to leak in and the building is under threat. The bolstering presences have all been withdrawn, one by one. Exiling him from these props is the next logical development.
V2: I don’t see that as inevitable at all. Yes, his friend the cat has gone, Our Lady of Sorrows has tried in vain to lead him out of the maze, but there is one last trope we haven’t tried yet.
Other Voice: Which is?
V2: I think you know.
V1: I’m not sure I do.
V2: The loop.
Other Voice: That is radical.
V2: But not untried. And not always unsuccessful where it has been tried.
V1: Acknowledged. I hadn’t thought it necessary in so simple a case as this, but apparently you can see more in him than I do.
V2: I’m not sure I do, and I’m not sure I’m doing him any favours by proposing this, but I agree that otherwise exile is the only alternative. And I’d just as soon avoid that.
V1: To keep up your numbers?
Other Voice: That was unkind.
V1: I’m sorry, I withdraw that last remark with apologies.
V2: Already forgotten.
Voice 1: ... in that case, we may have to resort to more radical action. Voice 2: Really? Isn’t that a little premature?
I think at this point I attempted to break in. To claim at least some part in the conversation – to assert my right to participate in something which sounded so final, and as if it affected me in particular.
At any rate I remember trying to sit up and speak, but in vain. If this was a kind of sleep paralysis, it was beyond my powers to break through it. And so I woke up with a pounding headache and a sense of doom.
Later that morning I sat down and wrote out the above. To be honest, it wasn’t really like writing. A kind of hole in my vision appeared, and I found myself describing the voices I’d overheard.
It’s recognisably in my style, but that is not my usual process for writing. I wondered, in fact, if it constituted some kind of a breakthrough for me. In any case, the strong emotions the dream had given rise to consumed me as I attempted to put it down on paper, and remained long after the writing itself was concluded.
•
– Have you had time to reconsider?
I’d been sitting out in the open for some time, watching her approach slowly from the immeasurable distance. Far off there was a line of mountains, but immediately in front of me was an arid plain – dusty, barren, and with only occasional interruptions of yellow-green shrubs and cacti.
It wasn’t anywhere I knew well, but then it was hard to say just what I did know well. This desert landscape seemed extracted from the quintessence of innumerable Westerns – The Searchers, and other movies by John Ford, in particular – though it did bear a slight resemblance, too, to my memories of the Volcanic Plateau.
That was criss-crossed with ditches and rough spots, though, and this was far flatter.
Wherever I was, then, it wasn’t there.
Which made her appearance even more inexplicable. Well-dressed, in an office power-suit kind of way, her black hair tied back in a tight bun.
Wherever she belonged, it wasn’t here.
I, by contrast, was in a dusty old shirt and jeans. I couldn’t remember putting them on, but then I couldn’t remember anything much from before.
Which made her first words to me so inexplicable.
– Would you like a cup of water? I replied, at length. I could see that the reason I’d ended up here was that there was a standing pipe with a watering trough attached to it. I seemed to be holding a cup, too: an old china cup marked with a railway logo.
– No, thank you. I won’t be here long. Have you had time to think about my question?
– Whether or not I’ve reconsidered? I guess so. I’m just not quite sure what it is I need to reconsider.
– Why you’re here, for one thing. Or rather, why you think that you’re here.
– Either I’m here or I’m not, surely? And if I am here, I certainly don’t know why.
– Oh, I think you do.
Which brought it all back. The little house – so like, yet really rather unlike – my own small house in the suburbs. My writing ambitions. The argument with my brother – sorry, my cousin, was it, I made him into? The dreams, the cat, Marguerite ... The whole kit and kaboodle.
– You’re the lady who came to the house.
– Just so.
– And I sent you away.
– You did. Have you had time to reconsider?
– If you mean, do I regret sending you away without hearing you out, then I certainly do. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but if you do, I’d be very grateful to hear it.
– Do you think that this is a dream?
– Well, I guess that it must be. It’s not the oddest dream I’ve had lately, that’s for sure.
– But does it feel like a dream?
She had me there. It certainly didn’t. It felt both real and unreal at the same time. In reality, if I’d come to on some dry floodplain, wearing clothes I couldn’t remember putting on, talking to a woman who came out of nowhere, I’d have been incoherent with shock. But on some level, I could see that this was no realer or less real than all the rest of it – the house, the job, the life.
– Let’s put it another way. Do you remember what you did?
– How do you mean what I did? I’ve done tons of things. I certainly regret some of them.
– The main one. D’you remember doing it? Why you did it? How?
– Yes.
And at that moment I did remember. All the thinking, all those violent thoughts – the weariness of it all. The moment of decision.
– Would you do it again?
– I’m not sure. I’m being honest here. I’d like to say no, but the truth is I’m not sure. It got pretty bad in here (tapping my head). You know.
– I know.
– Is that what all of this is about? Showing me how wrong I was, how if I’d hung on for one more day everything would have come right, that I would have prevailed?
– No. It’s not about anything, really. It’s just what you built for yourself as a place to come to. It may seem like a series of places, but you can see now that they all fold into one.
– So what should I do? I can’t go back, can I? You can’t do that for me, give me those minutes back, like in a time-travel movie, so I can try out a different choice?
– No.
– Are you just here to torment me, then?
– If you like. If that’s how you see me.
All of a sudden her face contorted into a sneer. Little horns poked up behind her ears, and a dark wind swirled around us.
– So I’m in hell. Is that it?
– Yes. If you want it to be.
– But I don’t want it to be. I don’t want to stay like this, going round and round the same things like a rat in a maze, unable to do or say anything that matters.
– What would you rather it was?
– You mean I can choose? I can make this anything I like? Transform it into a rather dry version of heaven? Or purgatory?
– I mean, what would you rather it was?
– I guess I’m not ready for Heaven. I’d rather it were Purgatory, then, I suppose. I’d rather I was learning something, learning how not to be like this all the time.
– Good to know.
– Is that it, then? You’re not going to wave your magic wand and turn it all into the foothills of Mt. Purgatory in the Antipodes, start me off on my journey up the hill to the terrestrial paradise?
– You know, you can be quite witty sometimes. It’s one of the things that’s held you back, that cynicism of yours, but it’s also one of your saving graces.
– So that’s it, then? This is purgatory?
– No.
– No?
– No more than it’s hell or heaven. It’s the last dying moments of an organism devoted to sight and sound, desperately improvising more dreamworlds to stave off the end of oxygen starvation.
– So it’s all pointless, then? You’re not here, I’m not here. The only thing that’s actually real is me with a noose round my neck?
– If you like.
– But I don’t like. I just told you that. And I heard your conversation with those other spirits. You were on my side then.
– Was I?
– I thought so, yes. Now I’m not quite so sure.
– Perhaps I’m just a messenger. Perhaps I don’t really make the executive decisions.
– A messenger from whom?
– Whom. Good one. Important to keep your grammar straight right till the end. A messenger from you, of course.
– From me? But I’m here.
– Part of you is, yes, but maybe not all. Maybe there’s other parts of you as well.
– You mean parts in the past? Or versions of me in other paths in the universe?
– Whichever one you prefer.
– Can I stop all this, do you mean?
– I think so, yes. But do you really want to?
– Of course I do.
– Even though you don’t have the faintest idea where you’re going? Whether there’ll still be a you when it stops? Are you really ready for that?
– Um.
– I thought not. Sorry.
– No, wait! I just had to think for a second. Yes, of course I’m ready for that, ready to stop all of this, ready to go anywhere I should go, ready ...
•
What do you write in one of these, anyway? In the movies they always ask, ‘Did he leave a note?’ so I suppose that I should. It seems to arouse suspicion if the answer’s ‘no.’
It’s been much worse lately. I’ve been lying awake most of the night, trying to get off the treadmill, but round and round it goes: you’re useless, you’re a waste of space, you’ve never done anything good, or anything at all, really, and so on and so on and so on.
O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall – a quotation for every occasion, that’s me.
The only thing I could find to quiet it all down and give me a bit of piece was imagining a noose. Yes, I’d visualise tying it, attaching it to some sturdy hook in the ceiling, adjusting it round my neck, and – bing! – game over.
It seemed like a hopeful thing, really – a door marked EXIT in the middle of an exceptionally tiresome family reunion.
Do I regret doing it? Well, I haven’t done it yet – otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. Q.E.D. Maybe I’ll have second thoughts. Maybe I’ll erase all this bullshit. Maybe there’s no point in any of this.
I’m very very sorry if this causes any pain to anyone. It’s hard to see how it would, but they always say that it’s hardest on the ones left behind. I doubt that’ll be the case here, and I’m definitely, sincerely not doing this to have the last word, or to try and make any of you feel sorry for me, regret that you weren’t nicer to me when I was alive.
Yes, it has that posthumous feel to it, already. It’s not your fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine, of course, but I’m not sure if even that is true. Nobody’s Fault. Isn’t that a novel by someone? Probably. I would have gone and looked it up in my previous existence. Wilkie Collins, maybe? I’ll never know, because I’m not going to look it up, and I won’t be here to wonder for much longer.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Anyone who finds this is welcome to destroy it if you don’t find it … constructive exactly.
But then, cut me some slack, Jack. I’m not in my right mind, after all. By definition. What better proof do you need?
I’m glad, in a way, that Toby isn’t here to live through this. That wasn’t the thing that pushed me over, either, though of course it didn’t help. But I won’t have to ask anyone to look after him and brush his fur and put up with all his little ways.
The rest of you can fend for yourselves. I hope you do a far better job of it than I was able to manage. I’m sure you all will. Sayonara, suckers.
Sorry. I really am sorry. But that’s enough.
Love (or what you will)
•
There’s a very big difference between a metaphorical mountain and the real thing. Birds’-eye views of majestic landscapes flashing by are just so utterly unlike putting each foot down one after the other on a rocky, ill-defined trail.
Mountain streams, too. They look so innocuous, but the sheer shock of the cold when you plunge into one, not to mention the strength of the current, always combines to take you by surprise.
‘Twenty minutes to the hut’ means more than two hours humping a heavy pack over rough ground, crossing and re-crossing the same stream as you work your way up the glacial moraine, only to find a rough wooden structure already packed to the rafters with other overnight visitors.
You find you can’t even go inside – there’s such a squirming multitude of people in there – although you know that sooner or later, when dark falls, you’ll have to. There are some biscuits and other snacks in your pack, and you can chew on those rather than try to heat up anything in the minuscule kitchen.
It’s only the beginning, of course. Perhaps it’s because such hikes are so little to your taste that you’ve found yourself here. A long sea voyage, with its enforced inactivity, would probably suit you better. But the constant sense of queasiness at the ship’s motion might make that even more unendurable.
So it goes on, day after day. Different landscapes, different tracks, crowded huts, and only the slightest sense of the distant mountains coming nearer.
Sometimes it rains – for weeks at a time, you feel – so you have to get used to never being quite dry. To water penetrating every last fold of your clothes (and your canvas pack, too).
But still you go on. There’s nothing else to do except sit down and rest. Which you do do, frequently. Less frequently as the days and weeks go by and mount into months. For all that means. There’s no choice. Or, rather, there is, but it must have been taken some time back, sometime in the distant, inaccessible past.
You have no companions on the way, but at times you sense that there might be others – just visible out of the corner of the eye, grey figures, cloudy impressions, marching at the edge of sight.
And there may be creatures out there, too. Not the vast shadowy beasts that hunt you still in your dreams, but something smaller, more comforting. You’re almost sure you’ve felt a small flank pressed up against you at night. A little cat, perhaps.
If they’re there, they’re there. The way’s the way, and that’s an end of it. Your long walk continues, and you find, above all, that you’re grateful for the pain of it: the feeling of those sharp stones that bruise you even through the soles of your boots, the thorns that get caught in your skin, the sweat trickling down as the slopes become steeper, the glare of the sun in the sky.
•
[Editor’s note: The original draft of this story included a number of interleaved, loose-leaf pages which appear to have been intended as the ‘course’ texts referred to in the narrative. They were taken from, respectively:
- An Adventure, by Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain (1911)
- Phantasms of the Living, by Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, & Frank Podmore (1886)
- Arcana Coelestia, by Emanuel Swedenborg (1749-1756)
- The Astral Plane, by C. A. Ledbetter (1895)
I’ve included them all here, in case there is some further function they were intended to serve in the narrative. – M. S. (20/9/23)]:
•
Sample Text I:
Friends
After some days of sight-seeing in Paris, to which we were almost strangers, on an August afternoon, 1901, Miss Lamont and I went to Versailles. We had very hazy ideas as to where it was or what there was to be seen. Both of us thought it might prove to be a dull expedition. We went by train, and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest, though we constantly regretted our inability through ignorance to feel properly the charm of the place. ....
We sat down in the Salle des Glaces, where a very sweet air was blowing in at the open windows over the flower-beds below, and finding that there was time to spare, I suggested our going to the Petit Trianon. My sole knowledge of it was from a magazine article read as a girl, from which I received a general impression that it was a farmhouse where the Queen had amused herself.
Looking in Baedeker's map we saw the sort of direction and that there were two Trianons, and set off. By not asking the way we went an unnecessarily long way round, – by the great flights of steps from the fountains and down the central avenue as far as the head of the long pond. The weather had been very hot all the week, but on this day the sky was a little overcast and the sun shaded. There was a lively wind blowing, the woods were looking their best, and we both felt particularly vigorous. It was a most enjoyable walk. …
On the way back to Paris the setting sun at last burst out from under the clouds, bathing the distant Versailles woods in glowing light, – Valerien standing out in front a mass of deep purple. ...
For a whole week we never alluded to that afternoon, nor did I think about it until I began writing a descriptive letter of our expeditions of the week before. As the scenes came back one by one, the same sensation of dreamy unnatural oppression came over me so strongly that I stopped writing, and said to Miss Lamont, ‘ Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted.’ Her answer was prompt, ‘Yes, I do.’ [5]
•
Sample Text II:
Dialogue
February 18th.
Who are you that writes, and has told all you know?
A.Wife.
But does no one tell wife what to write? If so, who?
A.Spirit.
Whose spirit?
A.Wife’s brain.
But how does wife’s brain know (certain) secrets?
A.Wife’s spirit unconsciously guides.
But how does wife’s spirit know things it has never been told?
A.No external influence.
But by what internal influence does it know (these) secrets?
A.You cannot know.
March 15th.
Who, then, makes the impressions upon her?
A.Many strange things.
What sort of strange things?
A.Things beyond your knowledge.
Do, then, things beyond our knowledge make impressions upon wife?
A.Influences which no man understands or knows.
Are these influences which we cannot understand external to wife?
A.External – invisible.
Does a spirit, or do spirits, exercise those influences?
A.No, never (written very large and emphatically.)
Then from whom, or from whence, do the external influences come?
A.Yes; you will never know.
What do you mean by writing ‘yes’ in the last answer?
A.That I really meant never.
– Devonport, 1871 [6]
•
Sample Text III:
Anecdote
The angels told me that when Melancthon died he was provided with a house deceptively like the one in which he lived in this world. (This happens to most newcomers in eternity upon their first arrival – it is why they are ignorant of their death, and think they are still in the natural world.) All the things in his room were similar to those he had had before – the table, the desk with its drawers, the shelves of books. As soon as Melancthon awoke in this new abode, he sat at his table, took up his literary work, and spent several days writing – as usual – on justification by faith alone, without so much as a single word on charity. This omission being remarked by the angels, they sent messengers to question him. ‘I have proved beyond refutation,’ Melancthon replied to them, ‘that there is nothing in charity essential to the soul, and that to gain salvation faith is enough.’ He spoke with great assurance, unsuspecting that he was dead and that his lot lay outside Heaven. When the angels heard him say these things, they departed.
After a few weeks, the furnishings in his room began to fade away and disappear, until at last there was nothing left but the armchair, the table, the paper, and his inkstand. What is more, the walls of the room became encrusted with lime, and the floor with a yellow glaze. Melancthon’s own clothes were now much coarser. He wondered at these changes, but he went on writing about faith while denying charity, and was so persistent in this exclusion that he was suddenly transported underground to a kind of workhouse, where there were other theologians like him. Locked up for a few days, Melancthon fell to doubting his doctrine, and was allowed to return to his former room. ...
It was at this point that he decided to write something concerning charity. The only difficulty was that what he wrote one day he could not see the next. This was because the pages had been written without conviction. Melancthon received many visits from persons newly dead, but he felt shame at being found in so run-down a lodging. In order to have them believe he was in Heaven, he hired a neighbouring magician, who tricked the company with appearances of peace and splendour. The moment his visitors had gone – and sometimes a little before – these adornments vanished, leaving the former plaster and draughtiness. The last I heard of Melancthon was that the magician and one of the faceless men had taken him away into the sand hills, where he is now a kind of servant of demons. [7]
•
Sample Text IV:
Adjustment
So abundant and so manifold is this life of the astral plane that at first it is absolutely bewildering to the neophyte; and even for the more practised investigator it is no easy task to attempt to classify and to catalogue it. If the explorer of some unknown tropical forest were asked not only to give a full account of the country through which he had passed, with accurate details of its vegetable and mineral productions, but also to state the genus and species of every one of the myriad insects, birds, beasts, and reptiles which he had seen, he might well shrink appalled at the magnitude of the undertaking: yet even this affords no parallel to the embarrassments of the psychic investigator, for in his case matters are further complicated, first by the difficulty of correctly translating from that plane to this the recollection of what he has seen, and secondly by the utter inadequacy of ordinary language to express much of what he has to report. However, just as the explorer on the physical plane would probably commence his account of a country by some sort of general description of its scenery and characteristics, so it will be well to begin this slight sketch of the astral plane by endeavouring to give some idea of the scenery which forms the background of its marvellous and ever-changing activities. Yet here at the outset an almost insuperable difficulty confronts us in the extreme complexity of the matter. All who see fully on that plane agree that to attempt to call up before those whose eyes are as yet unopened a vivid picture of this astral scenery is like speaking to a blind man of the exquisite variety of tints in a sunset sky – however detailed and elaborate the description may be, there is no certainty that the idea presented before the hearer's mind will be an adequate representation of the truth. [8]
Notes:
[1] Ezra Pound, 'Canto LXXIV'. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. 1970. NDP 824 (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1996), 445.
[2] Image by Daniela Gast & Rowan Johnson, after stevebwriter, 'The Cube of Space' (16/11/12). [https://www.flickr.com/photos/wackystuff/8190924514].
[3] Image by Daniela Gast & Rowan Johnson, after David Lafferty, ‘Maps of Dante’s Afterlife’ (7/2/14). [http://dwlafferty.blogspot.com/2014/02/maps-of-dantes-inferno.html].
[4] Image by Daniela Gast & Rowan Johnson, after Harry Pettit, ‘Raising Hell: Ancient Egyptian coffin contains “oldest map of the underworld” inscribed 4,000 years ago.’ (8/10/19). [https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/10090139/ancient-egypt-coffin-map-underworld/].
[5] Anon [Anne Moberly & Eleanor Jourdain]. An Adventure. 1911. Preface by Edith Olivier. Note by J. W. Dunne (London: Faber, 1937), 43-44 & 50.
[6] Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, & Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living. 2 vols (1886). [https://www.esalen.org/ctr-archive/book-phantasms.html#readme].
[7] Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia (1749-1756). [http://biblio3.url.edu.gt/Libros/borges/infamia.pdf].
[8] C. A. Ledbetter, The Astral Plane (1895). [https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en/books/TheAstralPlane_10001602].
•
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