A BOOK AGAINST FEAR

by

david lisle crane

consists of two parts:

SITTING IN MEDICI’S
(new century press, durham 1998: ISBN 0 948545 06 2)
pp 2-41

LIVING IN THE SUN
(new century press, durham 2000: ISBN 0 948545 13 5)
pp 42-67

free email copy from: davidlislecrane@yahoo.com











SITTING IN MEDICI'S




I

a title can just as well record the moment a book began as tell what it's about; and this book began with laura buying me dinner in medici's because i didn't have much money after abruptly leaving the university. and now it's begun i must go on with it.

what i hope is that what i write here will have both the unpremeditated quality and the irreversibility of speech. what i say in speech cannot be unsaid and if i wish i had said something different, there is no delete key which will make it as though it had never been; all that can be done is to negotiate the sense one now wants to make, out of the collective memory of what has already been said. one of the grievances i have against the word processor is that processing is not something which should be done with words, that they should not be too elaborately messed about with to prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet. this is the verbal equivalent of not being able to meet the world without being groomed and pomaded. it is at the other end of the scale from the sudden contact of ‘i would meet you upon this honestly’. or say that the difference is between the eerie perfection of a musical performance recorded and re-recorded bar by bar until no blemish is to be heard, and the rougher life of the piece heard live (perhaps the phrase live music should invite a description of its recorded opposite as dead music) - to want speech, or live writing as its written equivalent, is not to suppose that human communication is somehow best when it is careless or slovenly or approximate; rather it is to suggest that the best communication is what is distinguished by ingrained habits of honest, fearless, direct and accurate language. the habit of saying what one means and of using only words that mean something is so much to be preferred to the crafted intricacies of much modern language - and so i come to the fragment of vergil which has been pressing upon my mind for a little while, waiting to be used, and say that i hope this book will be ‘breve et irreparabile’, short and irrecoverable, and also vivid with the human life that vergil was celebrating as he mourned in those words its swift passage.

II

chapter one sounds like the undefended heart, and at this precise moment i can’t think of any other kind of book to write, and this because the things i couldn’t find ways of writing about then still leave my pen hovering over blank space - now is the moment to try, and as is surely always the case, it is only at the precise moment when the endeavour rightly starts that the energy and ingenuity is suddenly there to be drawn upon. it is not fear that has made me hesitate but rather the thought that a book from which its readers turn away might as well not have been written. - i shall say what seem like many absurd things or offensive things or indelicate things, but really i don’t even want to lose a single reader who has read this far.

i look directly at that reader and say that the heart of the matter is never to cause fear and never to feel it, and that those two different states of darkness which are the readiness to cause fear and the helpless experiencing of it are intricately and closely linked; so that behind the inhuman mask of a causer of fear one may always detect terror, although the reverse need not apply, so that to feel afraid need not mean that inevitably one begins on the business of making someone else afraid - indeed, it may be a sudden relief to realise that the resolution not to reply in kind when another human being tries to make you afraid is the most effective form of escape from fear.

to cause fear is the central act of darkness, and even the mildest form of that causing associates one with the grossest form, much as an anti-semitic joke touches hands somewhere with the extermination camps, as of course does the willingness to bully someone out of an anti-semitic feeling with the observation that this is so. the hunters down of nazi war criminals are dancers in the same dark dance as those they pursue - indeed conceivably more so, because there is perhaps no deeper form of self-deception than to suppose oneself on the side of the light as one defends it with the weapons of darkness, so that the most convinced and whole-hearted dancers are those who think that by fear something may be done that is other than dark. it is the judge who is more deeply deceived than the criminal, and the lunacy of his understanding of reality will cause him more severe momentary vertigo after he dies and reality offers itself to him in its proper shape.

the great, if temporary, triumph of darkness is to be found among those who are prepared to use it for good ends - the light-bearers, the lucifers, who can say ‘evil be thou my good’, and it is in this sense that the very centre of darkness in milton’s poem is to be found in the God of paradise lost. the great concentration camp in the sky (far better and more cruelly organised and run than the nazi variety because run for the express purpose of creating fear and suffering) that milton’s God prepares for the fallen angels would have been for the seventeenth-century mind the ultimate justification of all humanly imposed punishment, every judge a little God presiding over his little hell in the name of good; but milton’s unconvinced humanity revolted against what his creed obliged him to believe, as happened with leonard cheshire when he was required to accept that the successful bombing of hiroshima showed that God was on our side.

i believe judges still go to church before they set about their grisly business, and there they bow their wigged heads, their heavily disguised and burdened humanity, to milton’s God. i wish for them freedom and delight, and for milton’s God a place amid the relics of other savage superstitions.

III


is there then to be no law? are there then to be no regulations? - is the world to be like the land of ulysses' nightmare fancy?

take but degree away, untune that string,
and hark what discord follows. each thing meets
in mere oppugnancy. the bounded waters
should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
and make a sop of all this solid globe.
strength should be lord of imbecility,
and the rude son should strike his father dead.
force should be right, or rather right and wrong,
between whose endless jar justice resides,
should lose their names, and so should justice too.
then every thing includes itself in power,
power into will, will into appetite,
and appetite, an universal wolf,
so doubly seconded with will and power,
must make perforce an universal prey,
and last eat up himself.

it has about it the insistent logic of nightmare, this vision of what must happen if the order of our society is shaken; and it has the characteristic touch of many defences of the established order, that it writes in the blank spaces of what would happen without that order, familiar monsters, rather like the almost tame, almost well-beloved sea-serpents and anthropophagi that crowded the unknown parts of the world in the old maps, and now crowd the outer regions of space in the new films. this conjuring up of horrors introduces us to worlds not unknown enough, it uses all the old ideas - like a politician evoking with awe the prospect of a world without politics. we need by contrast to think in really new ways, ways that spring neither from a defence of nor an opposition to what surrounds us now - this book is not a tract for the times; it can only take place in the absence of news.

for it is our daily ration of news, in the papers, on the radio and television, which holds us firmly to the belief that no order is achievable without fear, without threat. if ulysses' speech is a set-piece of reaction with its own intrinsic momentum, then the envisaging of a world without news would trigger a reaction every bit as confident, as richly and familiarly detailed in its exploration of the spaces thus made blank.

it is the characteristic of the most effective kind of propaganda that everyone believes it, even (or perhaps most of all) those who produce it; even (perhaps most surprisingly) those who oppose it. to see instead a world genuinely without news of the kind we have every day, one has to live without it so that it drifts into a kind of irrelevance. then it may seem mildly surprising to contemplate a strange, orwellian culture in which everyone is subjected daily to an account of the latest laws and their attached punishments, to stories of the frightfulness of law-breaking, to exciting stories of the pursuit, capture and punishment of law-breakers (with special mention of parts of the world where the punishments are inhumane), and to the latest information about wars and the rumours of wars. the inhabitants of such a culture are so overwhelmed, so sodden, with the notion of retribution, revenge, that even those who strive most strenuously, for instance, against the horror of war propose as their ultimate remedy the use of war.

there has always been war, there has always been revenge, so a culture flooded with ideas of it is, someone may say, not flooded with propaganda but with the natural atmosphere of human life. - well, if we say rather that this is the natural atmosphere of human death, one might be nearer the mark. it is surely so that in most human lives the moments marked by death, by fear or by the resolve to use fear, stand out as interruptions, distortions of the energies by which we live; and if we are subject daily to a carefully selected catalogue of fears and disasters, drawn from the corrosion of misery which spreads throughout the whole world, then it is right to suggest we are being fed with propaganda, that is, with an edited version of the totality of what happens daily, designed to persuade us that being alive means constantly fighting for survival. - but let the mind drift away from that to the realisation that the sun does not fight to rise again every morning, nor my heart to go on beating - the miseries that everywhere infect the world are nevertheless not the fundamental story, and we should rather bring to the opposing of those miseries the habitual ease of life, the sense that being alive is a fact not to be striven for but to be enjoyed, than to bring to the ordinary business of living a poisonous attitude of competitive fear bred from a highly specialised culture of misery which is capable in reality only of spreading misery and darkness and not of dissipating it.

IV

the sun rises in the morning even though no one would punish it if it did not, just as i imagine most people drive on the correct side of the road in order to avoid the natural consequences of not doing so and not in order to avoid a police fine. - what i have just written here invites me to talk about the darkness of natural disaster with its attendant fears and the darkness of humanly engineered disaster with its attendant fears - do i need to distinguish between plague and police? - well, perhaps this: things fall apart if they lose hold on their proper intrinsic order - the plant dies cut at its root because it needs to be joined to the earth to live; the engine of a car with the plug leads muddled will not function because the cylinders are trying to fire in the wrong order - in the universe inside which we have been created there are many things which attack or impede the order which is essential to life, because in this universe darkness (the fount of chaos) is almost as much at home (almost) as its native light - to be on the side of light means leading a naturally orderly life, not with the fussiness of an imposed order which operates by fear and traps us with its pretence of the real thing (always stand to attention on the parade ground) but with an intuitive feel for the intrinsic order of things, the shapeliness that fosters the ease and delight of life - because darkness is on every side, this kind of order is always under attack, by plague or tempest, by the clashing of one order with another (so that to survive one animal, for instance, must eat another), by the arising of spurious and fear-laden versions of order, so that fear, the very heart and voice of darkness, is linked by what seems a naturally indissoluble bond with the idea of order that no one can do without - and that brings me from plague to police - that very intuition of a natural order that delights in the freedom of life thus enabled, that delights in the well-tuned string of the beginning of ulysses’ speech, should enable us to recognise instantly the spurious order which rides cancerously on the back of it and suggests that life is only possible within the restraints imposed by fear - about natural disaster, about cancers of the body and the inevitability of death we can do something but not much; but about humanly engineered darkness, about spurious order imposed by fear we can perhaps do more, even by just writing orderly words about it that try to focus steadily on the disjunction between the tree in its good spot of earth and the citizen kept obedient by the threat of punishment -

V

i’m writing this in the early morning - bird song and sunlight and a little dog sniffling about - in the new forest. the tent is full of sleeping bodies amid a considerable jumble of stuff since we are half-way through a tour with the comedy of errors - our collective and individual efforts to maintain the order of domestic life reveal how complicated that order is and in what unexpectedly different ways each of us experiences distress and apprehension as bits of the usual order become difficult or impossible to maintain. what makes for ease in these circumstances? - to rely on a very simple rather than a complicated order of life, evidently; but also something more than that - something to do with the avoidance of the tyranny of perfection - it is perhaps true that as we come close to the natural order by which we live so as not to die, it reveals itself as capable of being flexible and approximate. our whole culture, the christian notion of God in all his perfection at its now rather decayed centre, inclines us to suppose that the nearer we get to reality the more demandingly, geometrically perfect it will be, and we strive for that perfection, even though human beings (unlike the machines originally intended to assist this effort at perfection, and now likely to outstrip us, irrelevantly, in the achieving of it) are not designed for moral or bodily or logical perfection, nor for the perfectly geometric completion of tasks - and that is because the high god (high always as in high summer not as in on high) who created them is not that way either, and himself contemplates anything but the approximate with a degree of perplexity - the earth he made is not (perfectly) round, but does well enough; neither does it go that smoothly round the sun, tends to wobble a bit. what i am saying, i suppose, is that beyond what functions perfectly well without much effort there is always a nightmare world created out of darkness in which with more, and more, effort it might be made to work better, and even better - the ludicrously accurate watch, reliable to a trillionth of a thingumybob. - why this? what’s it all about? - for an answer that suits me (and which i offer as a possibility) let me contemplate the christian notions that animate our western culture in terms of my own understanding of the opposition between light and darkness. - Almighty God, Infinite in all perfections, as the christian theologians would say, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, created a world similarly perfect in its moral and mechanical order; the darkness of sin arose and severely damaged that order, producing disaster and death, a death that would have been final had not Christ opened a path for believers back to that moral and physical perfection for which they were intended. the true believer, then, will especially strive every second of his life for a moral perfection, observing every commandment, which will make him entirely pleasing to God who saves him from the just punishment awaiting sinners. - this set of notions, in my own understanding, feeds firstly on the undeniable fact that there is darkness opposing light in the world, chaos opposing order, and then grasps hold of the light as a weapon against darkness in such a way as to make it itself an instrument of fear so that the realm of darkness is subtly in fact extended by the apparent struggle conducted against it. - in reality the light of the high god is not terrible in all perfection, searching out all the hidden sins of the heart (any more than he wears the ultimately accurate wristwatch) but more like a friendly, useful 100w bulb. we should try for the things we can easily do, evade the restrictions that prevent us, not bother much with a moral orderliness, or an orderliness in this tent or on this tour, that we can’t maintain with ease and delight - and keep sniffing the air in the direction of freedom, which has a natural habit of spreading to and delighting in the ease and freedom of other people, animals, things.

VI

when god made us he didn’t do everything that could be done, didn’t make the greatest effort of which he was capable; and neither should we. all this striving, whether in technology, in business, or in sport seems to me just a set of strange dark blossoms arising out of the decayed remnants of christian moral striving that are stinking the place out at the centre of our culture. - i think of the runners i’ve just seen on television in someone’s house, puffing their way round the track, and how odd that activity is when set in the context of all the other physical movements on the face of the earth - except under the impulse of fear no animal would run as fast as it could; it is only human culture which produces false fears, the fear of losing a race, to make people produce effort near to their limit of capability, like soldiers training for real war with blank ammunition - perhaps one of the features of human civilisation is its ability to produce false fears, to simulate the real fear we can feel and so extend the darkness in which we live for its own sinister purposes. - but in reality our voluntary human activity should go in exactly the opposite direction so that we are careful to learn nothing, to derive no lesson, from the fear by which we are unavoidably surrounded - it is not, after all, as though we should not reach high peaks of physical effort whilst travelling in this opposite direction, arising from sexual excitement or a child’s delight in being alive and running downhill - we would use our capacities but not be grimly training and straining to shave half a second off our best time - i remember the kind of effort i used to put into ‘having a fight’ with my best friend at school when i was about ten years old - it was not like training for real war with blank ammunition but subtly and totally the reverse of that (i can feel the subtlety and totality of it but must pause here before trying to put words to it because my little daughter is dancing naked in front of me wet from the bath and ..) - so let me return to this feeling and reach for words for it now - the soldier training for war with blank ammunition has his consciousness always directed towards the real business of killing and being killed in a fight - whereas ian and i ‘having a fight’ were using the starting point of battle but moving away from it towards sex; no sports master would conceivably have been satisfied with our fighting, and had we been put in the boxing ring our fighting would have been directed powerfully in the other direction, not towards sex but towards real fighting.

VII

i suppose it’s important, when thinking about human civilisation, to consider whether its manufactured fears move towards the real fear in the world (as i assumed in the last chapter) or away from it, in the way of that pretended boys’ fight - because there is all the difference in the world there between malignity and benignity - it is difficult to believe that the major cultural fears by which we are encompassed are other than malign: army, police, law, religion, officialdom all look eagerly towards the real inevitable fear with which we are surrounded as the source of their power over us, indeed sometimes try even to pretend that their manufactured fear is greater than the natural sort, as with the unspecifiable pains of hell or its modern religious counterpart, the indescribable grief of God at our sin - these forces hold hands darkly with each other as they look towards and venerate the real fear of pain and death and conflict which is there for us all; so bishops bless those about to kill and be killed for their country; so in the old testament (numbers 31) the israelites at God’s command massacre all the adults and children of the midianites, saving only the virgins for themselves; so in england, before setting about their business, the judges robed in the red fire of hell go to church; so we see that in all the places where there are police they tend to act in ways strongly reminiscent of the bullying fearsomeness they are alleged to be curbing - better an unofficial thug, one might say, than an official one, because firstly he will have more limited power at his command to cause fear, and secondly is more open, honest and innocent about his involvement with darkness than the thugs on the bench and on the beat - i speak with emphasis, but if it really is the case that the high god uses no fear, then the emphasis is not misplaced or exaggerated.

and what of culturally benign fear, what of ‘having a fight’?- we see a different world here: we see how human culture can be on the side of light - i think of certain kinds of drama: of some mediaeval English plays, for example, where the devil has become a figure of fun, the dramatic presentation a way of anaesthetising the private fears of individual spectators by bringing them into a common arena and laughing at them; or of some modern plays about aids, where it is not laughter but the acknowledgement of the fearful that allows a negotiated withdrawal from it - facing it allows facing away from it. it may even be that certain kinds of military manoeuvre are as much a substitute for the real excitement of killing and being killed as a preparation for it. as is very often the case, there may be a turning to the light in the midst of what seems like an engagement with darkness, just as the reverse may be true as well. the needle may flicker back and forth across the dial in a very perplexing way, which is nevertheless susceptible of a very simple understanding - perhaps one of the characteristics of truth is just this, that it doesn’t so much simplify the tangle of things as allow that tangle ample space for itself within the copiousness of a simple understanding -

VIII

- i don’t suppose, for instance, that the high god, if called upon to explain the phenomenon of electricity, would issue forth a textbook of daunting complexity - the resort to complex explanation is rather what characterises an insecure and ‘non-native’ understanding. the difference is between my setting out to learn the english language by grammatical means, a fearsomely complex task, and the more complex the more intelligent i am, and simply learning and knowing it as my native tongue. there begin to be ways now of teaching a second language which resemble the ways in which it is thought children learn their native language, even though these tend often to be clumsy and approximate resemblances, and to encounter the great difficulty that adult learners have more or less lost the ‘language learning capacity’ of children - whatever the difficulties, though, it seems a good aim in general to have, to know things in the secure and ‘native’ way that we know our native tongue. this is certainly the way to know about literature, for instance, or about physical skills like riding a bicycle or joining two pieces of wood, rather than the way of theory, diagram or graph - and as we try to learn more and more in this way perhaps our childlike capacity for native learning will slowly recover, so that more and more we seem to know things by instinct not by reference to a wilderness of books and articles - we shall know then with the kind of security and the kind of accuracy with which an animal moves, a security not to be attributed to much theoretical understanding of the behaviour of physical forces, and an accuracy much more relaxed and undemanding than that of the ultimate wristwatch - i guess that when we talk to god finally, he’ll just seem to know about things, and will uncannily give us the sense that we do too - and so i understand a bit more what i don’t like about computers, it is the raw theory of them, the rigid, demanding, uncomprehending, simple-mindedness with which their programming fails to match the simpleness and subtlety of the human desire to act, like taking a mechanical dog for a walk; it would for ever be looking up at you and asking in its tinny voice whether you wanted to change course now - a question, like many others in many forms, prospectuses, syllabuses, systems, theories, to which there is no fully human answer - let this drift off into silence now; i could say more (and no doubt shall later on) but not so as to succeed in saying the thing any more clearly.

IX

in a week’s time i’m going to france, to stay in a little house by the river loire about 30 miles from where i was first born, sixteen hundred years ago. - and in the space of that stroke of a pen a week has passed in which i’ve written nothing, and now i’m lying full length in a sunny breeze a few yards south of the loire and about 30 miles upstream from the top of a hill on the north bank and my old home, where i lived in some grief and in the greatest possible delight and love some time ago. time is most really not to be measured by mechanical means, the movement of accurate clocks, but by the pauses and leaps, the certainties and forgettings, of human memory. i, who can scarcely remember what i was doing a week ago, at the back end of that pen stroke, have the most crystalline picture in my mind of the time a bit further down the river; and i know what it is like to be there with a certainty i have never felt about the way i know what it is like to be here. the grip i have on physical life there pulls me with a magnetic force which makes my never so confident grip here at times seem eccentric - so for example i habitually wear a roman tunica (accented in the gaulish way on the second syllable) next to my skin, and speak to my two little girls and the girl who is their mother and my lover in the latin i spoke then, a very far cry, or rather laugh, indeed from cicero, or indeed from the worn and crumbled remnants i now hear making the new and different experience of the french language all about us on this side of the river. - i speak latin so slowly, as slow as the river loire, which with the exception of occasional dashes is a very leisured affair, and these makers of rapid sounds all about me would be astonished how slow their origins were - the communication, of course, every bit as subtle and easy and almost instant as now but the long oars making almost no splash in the water. - which runs silently, or rather hardly runs at all, past this little farmhouse, past a hardly used track which leads round the corner and then itself past a statue of the virgin tucked into an angle of the hedge. not many people see the goddess of these fields and fewer take much notice of her, for sure, but her residual presence is evidenced by the fact that no-one would think or dream of removing the statue and every now and then someone cuts back the hedge behind her. across the other side of the river we had a statue in wood, of the god mercury, quite small and rather angular in feature, peasant woodwork, in an angle of the wall that enclosed the small garden near the house. mercury was then as ineradicable a residual presence as the virgin round the corner, and made wednesday, mercury’s day, not sunday the important day of the week. we thought of him as the little god, his day slipped in among all the big names, jupiter, venus, saturn, sun, moon, mars, just as we preferred ourselves to all the big things about the empire. the virgin, too, still perhaps excites more affection than the crucified God further on where the track joins the road. the crucified God is nearer to a position where he must be either accepted or rejected, not so easily to be carried about in a fold of the mind, like mercury or the virgin - we took no notice of mercury, which was easier than with the virgin because he was the fading representative of a never morally strenuous creed, but we would have noticed his final absence. of course, no one ever fought a war about him, or for that matter about jupiter or venus (though vergil had fancy literary notions about the gods and their chosen cities and races), as they did about the crucified God and how to worship him. looking back, i think i understand that the unobtrusive and entirely undemanding presence of mercury in a credal landscape almost empty of serious claimants to the top position (we thought as little as possible of the emperor) allowed a more easily arrived at instinctive sense of the reality of the high god than my experience in this present life, where the sense of god as undemanding and like a scent borne on the air has had to shake itself free of a savagely strenuous false claimant and all his credal works, including even the apparently innocuous little virgin round the corner. i could never feel as easy with her as with the wooden god and i imagine god might quite willingly have nercury in his garden but less willingly the virgin. anyway, he’s against virginity - one life drifts into another, the past and the present commenting on each other, and giving me more space in which to try to understand things than i would have in a single three score years and ten. -

i think it is the contrast between different lives which most of all makes for that space; they not only interweave with each other, but each of them also embodies within itself a sharply distinct account of reality, extending from the most general notions to the smallest particulars of living. as i contemplate the way we live now, there is a constant commentary on it from my memories of gaul in the fourth century, crete in the fifth and north africa in the sixth. so the present state of things has constantly to give an account of itself, to answer wide-eyed questions. - in some similar way, to come from england to france for a few weeks’ holiday has a similar effect. you can park almost anywhere, on any spare piece of pavement, on market days in ancenis, but at the local lycée all the children have the same satchel. england is infested with traffic wardens but not saddled with a uniformity of school bags. it is good to fancy a country with crazy-paving parking and an unofficial carriage of learning. nothing about learning in france is unofficial, and come to that, not much in england, though the official line is different. thinking backwards and forwards between the two countries one becomes acutely aware that the hidey-holes and enclaves of freedom are often by chance found in different places, cherished by different means and overlooked for different reasons by the darkness. the race is on perhaps between the steadily more uniform operation of the forces of darkness as communication in the world improves, and the more and more active questioning of rule and law as the variety of life on the face of the globe in the late twentieth century becomes more apparent. as always, the heavy guns are on the side of darkness, and the human heart in its most covert operation on the other side. package tourism (and insulated travel of all kinds), news, international meetings, official co-operation, against the oddity of arriving where you don’t understand and are not understood without a flexing of mind and body.

X

the smallest detail of physical difference is often the best to start with, not the large and abstract ideas which can slide more easily and treacherously into the realm of insulated travel - an exchange of ideas can well involve no passage at all either way of understanding - but we are physical creatures and little physical details speak to us with a kind of intensity and persistence that evades the blandness of much thought. - so i begin with the physical detail: the chapter numberings in this book are in roman figures (the mildly irritated modern reader will know why by now), and when i made the figure ten about five minutes ago at the beginning of this chapter, i began writing it at the bottom right hand because that’s the way i would have written it sixteen hundred years ago, and wherever possible all other capital letters. if i were writing the roman ten now, or any other capital, i would begin at the top left hand. - consider this difference, and its consequences - formal roman handwriting of the kind that i was taught tended to go one step forward and half a step back since many of the letters were made from right to left in a script that itself ran left to right - when i learnt this hand, of course, such an observation did not occur to me, even though the more rapid and informal handwriting used for a few ordinary purposes ran pretty steadily left to right - it is only when my writing hand compares a twentieth-century capital with its superficially similar fourth-century equivalent that i realise how like an engraver’s art the roman way was - one wrote formal letters deliberately against the grain of the movement from left to right, and with a reed pen no happier than a modern one at being made to make strokes from bottom to top - in a similar way an engraver in wood or stone has to cope with the recalcitrant natural wishes of his material - formal roman writing is furrowed into the paper, not kissed onto it with the light touch of a modern press, and just as one would not engrave in wood or stone without something of serious consequence to say, so then likewise not into paper - has my hand then, and my body, understood something from remembering the way it once wrote? or, come to that, from the experience of being able to write nothing at all in my two subsequent lives? - what it understands is the primacy of movement of the tongue and not the hand in language: the hand with the pen makes permanent or semi-permanent moves, but it can no more than the camera catch the reality of life as it lives - just as a really fine photographer can hope to make his camera lie its way back to the truth he saw, so a good writer; but no one would suggest that one should primarily look at the world by photographs, though many would hope to understand it by books. - what my hand understands, holding the pen, is that the single advantage of writing lies in a heaviness of permanence which disables it as a carrier of the feather-light detail of life as it is lived, that it is in that detail, the set of a head, the exact tone of a sound, the glance of an eye, that the struggle against darkness has to be conducted, and so that at least one should try to make writing that can convert itself, lie its way back, reach again the course and movement of the living creature moving, speaking, engaging with the constant movement of the world. - of course, there is an oddity here as well, that modern scribble has perhaps more of a chance of catching the bird on the wing than the heavy older way which suggested that the bird on the wing was what counts, for who could really take engraved words that seriously, or things thought of enough consequence to write? - so the old life and the new writhe gently with each other and neither leads the other; only the light should lead, wherever it may be now and then - i write with the slow brevity of an engraver as i make this book and with the hopes and attitudes of a scribbler.

XI

the river loire runs right to left as you watch it from this south side, and left to right from the northern bank, checked but not stopped by many islands and sandbanks, now as then - worded with the usual staggering effrontery of officialdom, notices on this side proclaim that bathing is forbidden in its waters and threaten punishment, precarious islands of pompous foolery in a sea of the laughter of all who have swum in this river and the few who have drowned in it. i have never drowned in it but i spent much of my first life swimming in it, walking down with peter (petrus) the mile or so to its banks from the top of the steep hill where we lived. you could swim in it, and of course swim naked in it, without being arrested, and we would have been incredulous to hear that a time would come when both those things were forbidden and when most people would find the prohibitions sensible and decent. there were things prohibited in our world, and savage punishments, and of course slaves who could do very little freely, though they could certainly swim naked in the river; but there was not the finely extended cobweb of prohibition, delicately anticipating the detail of human desire, that there is now. you could piss in the field or spit in the road. you could fuck in a hedgerow since sex was thought a normal and ubiquitous part of life. we did on occasion. - you could also be crucified or flogged - the powers of darkness sometimes, in some societies and times, seem to clump themselves into great thickets of oppression, and sometimes to spread like a thin disabling mist across the face of the earth - i don’t know which is more difficult; to counter the great oppressions or to keep one’s self dry and promise sunshine to others amid an extended drizzle of monition and prohibition. let there be no competition for first place; though it just happens at the moment that it’s the drizzle i want to think about - the difficulty about disliking drizzle is that the water in it gives life; the difficulty about disliking the ‘baignades interdites’ is that, for all that those who have drowned laugh at the regulation, they laugh (as those who have died can do, knowing and understanding more) with great accuracy and precision, never for an instant laughing away the fearsome moments of their death because finding the regulation ridiculous and sinister. what one objects to is being saved from fear by fear, the objection is to the means and not the end, but it is difficult always to speak and feel and react with the full energy of opposition the darkness ought to arouse and with nevertheless an accuracy of aim which overlooks nothing of the darkness countered by means of fear. i am against threatening regulations, i am against the drowning they seek to prevent. - perhaps, however, because in most people’s minds the loss of life is immeasurably a greater oppression than the loss of the freedom to swim, it is the more important to concentrate on the folly of prohibition, even though that invites a supposition that one doesn’t care about death - both the difficulty and the importance of speaking against the drizzle lies in the fact that most people don’t seem to think it too bad a thing to be damp.

XII

from the river loire to a travellers’ resting-place in the middle of crete about a hundred years after - just conceivable that a very old man in gaul who had known me there when he was a child would still have been alive when i was born again at the other end of the mediterranean. i do the arithmetic for idle interest’s sake, as i think of something to say: if he had known me as a child of three in the year i died ... but suddenly a more striking possibility: my little brother, patricius, was seven when i died in 368; he could have been a very old man of over 90 when i was born again in 456, knowing nothing of gaul, or the latin language, or the life of a roman noble, but about to learn uneducated, common or garden greek and to begin the life of a feeder and cleaner-out of horses, a good deal less valuable than they in the current coin, but for all my roughness of manner capable of greater suffering and greater delight than they were - two opposite imaginings are possible here: either the way in which every moment of all one’s lives might be qualified, commented upon, by the whole range of living possibility experienced, as though the roman noble, galerius, should contemplate the cretan petros for a moment; or else the way in which all living instants can be just themselves in a sea of forgetting what went before or came afterward - put it in terms of a single life and say that a successful man may be for good or ill reminded of his humble origins, or may succeed in isolating what he now is from what he was, for good or ill - or the other way about, lambert simnel in the royal kitchens, or hardy’s tess seduced by the illicit claimant of her family name - fruitful ground for moralising, all this, a quicksand to be avoided which swallows up all life; better to start thinking about it while holding on to the certainty that to be seduced is a good thing, and what god wants - marked out for tess before she was led astray was the narrow path of duty owed to almost every other human being she would meet, as daughter, wife, mother, worker; and the sense that the high god knows nothing of duty and wishes no living creature to be dutiful hidden from her by the commandments of the christian religion. the parson might also, to ensure her more effective imprisonment, advise her to forget the grand past of her family and live in the reality of her present humble state; or alternatively, to remember the humble lives of her parents and learn a dutiful way of life from them - the past conjured away or conjured up at the behest of an enslaving social and religious creed. by contrast, a better seducer than alec d'urberville might ask tess to remember her grand past with a smile that allowed her to forget the humble lives of her parents, and so to set out on a tricky path, beset by but not blocked by the other enslavement of nostalgia, towards freedom of spirit and body.- the past, in other words, whether of one’s present life or of one’s previous lives, is an instrument as readily in the hands of darkness as of light - i write these words while sitting in the seventeenth-century library cushioned between the castle and cathedral of durham, and can feel, experimentally, both an antiquity of books that might draw one to the deathly service of their longevity of minimal life, and the glorious uncoupling of age from the bustling pressure of minimal life outside - when and how to remember, and when and how to forget the past, or indeed remake it as it never was, is the skill to learn in the nosing out of freedom.- the memory of past lives is perhaps an instrument less easily grasped by the darkness than the memory of the past of one’s present life. to start with, in our western christian culture, the reality of any past life is simply denied, so that that reality has never been inhabited by or used in the service of the christian religion; and again, such remote and scarcely to be arrived at memories could hardly be summoned up and held in the imagination except for pleasure, curious delight, inquisitive lust. they have no automatic status in our minds and can be dismissed cursorily from view as not part of us if they threaten imprisonment, as they can indeed from the minds of some different believers if they threaten freedom - just because the memories of past lives are less easily grasped hold of in the service of darkness, it does not at all follow that they need often be picked up and used in the service of light. -

XIII

i was ruffianly though not vicious in crete in my second life - utterly uneducated - a looker-after of horses in a resting place in the middle of the island, the askifos plateau, through which travellers passed continuously on their way to and from arabia and parts further east. i knew nothing of that; only that strangers came and went all the time, and my business was with them. often they could hardly understand my speech, but this mattered little, since a horse is a horse is a horse. - i lived a long life, 68 years, and was married very young, at 14 (though i thought myself a bit older) - my little daughter, whom i cared for with much greater care than the horses, was run over and horribly killed by a laden cart when she was three years old, and her mother, who had never much liked her, was hysterical with grief, and refused after that any thought of any more children. she became by degrees a childless virgin devoted to religion (christian) and to my own mother.

and i not by degrees but suddenly, and without ever ceasing to care for my little daughter, became a lover of boys, for the rest of my life, hundreds of boys as they passed through north or south. an indiscriminate lover. i knew nothing of how appropriate a place crete was for that (though for certain i had known before i was born); how the cretans in classical greek times had been famous even in a greek culture devoted to the beauty of boys for their love of them; how plato had suggested that the cretans had invented the ganymede story to give the father of the gods, who had been born in their island, his catamite. - if this piece of life history had happened not fifteen hundred years ago but twenty years ago, many correctives would have been applied, some stinging, others emollient, to me and the boys i went with; psychological explanations would have accumulated to deal with an evil that could not be tolerated or left unexplained - but then, luckily, i was largely unnoticed; the prevailing christian belief certainly threatened the wrath of the new God upon those who followed the habits in this matter of the old one, but neither i nor the boys i went with were important enough to catch the attention of the official creed - there is a privilege and a freedom in ignorance and illiteracy which is extended in our days to fewer and fewer, and i had no idea what a sorry figure i would cut at the bar of the christian God when i died (and of course nothing like that happened when i did eventually die), only that my wife and my mother were angry at this other life of mine which gave me an energy and resolution not derived from them nor returning to them - it was not a happy state of affairs, and my ignorance not only protected me from the foolishness of the prevailing educated creed but also made it impossible for me to understand or come to terms with the bitter anger my life bred in them - i had a mulish obstinacy about the only way i could live, but i think i knew obscurely that i was in the midst of what was for me an insoluble knotting of light and darkness; and so i was neither surprised nor grieved when my wife and my old mother, reaching into the educated creed, or a fragment of it, for resolution to do the deed, at last poisoned me - and so rid themselves of a scandalously sinful man -

XIV

i can see that the shape of a life which i have just described offers itself with enchanted ease to ordinary modern psychological understanding and evaluation. what interests me, though, is the clear sense i have that the events of that life (and so perhaps of all lives) were decided upon before i was born to it, and that it was only the sleep and forgetting of birth that could so clear the ground of possible explanations for what i did and experienced as to make way for the superficial level of explanation we call psychological or for the stubborn attention to the event of the moment that, with the exception of the steady memory of my little daughter, filled almost all the horizon of my contemplation when i lived in crete. - let me add what i now seem to know, and certainly didn’t then, that the two human beings of greatest moment to me in my cretan life i had known already in my first life - or rather, more oddly than that, that my younger sister in gaul, who was called alicia and was sixteen when i died at the age of twenty-three, lived two partly overlapping lives afterwards, as my daughter and as the boy who first converted me to boys, the boy of course born a good number of years before the girl, and on the mainland of greece. - in that perspicuous but alas insufficiently physical antechamber to the solid but darkened reality of real physical life there was an understanding, a shape of energy, which i can try to reach for as an explanation of the cretan life. the explanation, the described shape, will be more poetical than psychological; and it will accept sexual energy as the polymorphous flinger of the light of what is created and existing on to the dark backdrop of non-existence, and not as the embarrassed necessity or the fumbling and illicit obsession of a society that thinks of itself as arising from other energies and looking towards other goals, whatever they may uncertainly be. - the energies of desire curl, dance, are checked, agonised, seek freedom, seek meeting, through the long string of lives each human being has, and alicia’s for me in gaul were checked by such great difficulties: that i being a boy had a boy for my lover, that she was my sister so that the passage was blocked by a fear that said incest, that i died and went away - i think i never knew her lust for me, and perhaps she had only known it clearly before she had been born - when he came to be born again, it was a long way from crete and he had to travel to meet his lover, to go on a journey after the one who had gone away, now no blood relation and no girl; but not losing the closeness of blood relation nor failing to be loved as the little girl killed by the cart; whose hands opened the latch of the gate that let in the boy - and then for most of my cretan life they were both memories to me, the boy gone away when his party of travellers left, the little girl dead, as though alicia were to explain to me that her wish was not to replace my lover in gaul but to be part of the dance - and to explain to me how extensive and capacious the dance was, how much and how many fidelities it asked - hundreds, many hundreds.

XV

my little six year old daughter kate (with whom the undefended heart ended) came the other day to ask, on her own behalf and that of her nearly three year old sister, nell, what was the truth about father christmas - i told her it was just a story -- that there is a physical reality, really possible, which is larger, more alive, more responsive to the range of desire, than the one in which, life after life, we have to manage, i am in no doubt - that the human imagination calls to and is called to by that physical reality which darkness for a while cripples, i am certain - that therefore we should value the human imagination not as leading us to imagined worlds but as holding out the sometime certainty of the physical satisfaction of our desire at its most extended and intense, seems clear - in this sense the greatest poetry is not imaginative but simply real - but there are some comforts of literature less bold and strenuous, father christmas comforts, which acquire a vacuous freedom for their imagined worlds at the price of admitting that they are not and could not be real - in the face of those one needs the physicality of a samuel johnson striking the table with his fist to make the point that human beings cannot live on meringues, and one needs the strength and courage of tennyson’s ulysses setting out for the happy isles to make the point that the insufficiency of meringues should nevertheless not reconcile us to a physical arena crippled and darkened in which to know and take delight in our desires - the cultivation of a meringue-world is often quite consciously allied to a ruling out of the possibility of the happy isles: ‘it’s a shame to deprive children of father christmas, because they soon enough have to grow up and live in the real world’ - the comforts of many religions are similar: paradisal candy floss entails an acquiescence in the most reduced hopes for our physical world -

when kate asks me whether the potion she’s making will help her to fly, i am in greater difficulties - i say perhaps - this isn’t like father christmas, a culturally despised story which commands belief among the helot class of children while being safely unbelieved by the patrician adults - the wish to fly is a more genuine language of desire, and i want to say that the good physical universe, in some way or another, will eventually be found capacious enough for all the delighted desires of living things - that imagination here is a foretaste of the real, both making demands of it and assuming its flexibility of response.

little children have not yet learnt the false lesson of repeated disappointment, nor of the postponed or substituted satisfaction of desire, though they are surrounded by an adult world which is willing to teach them this realism or to play stupid, already defeated games of make-belief with them. - that we must be mistaken in our understanding of the reality that surrounds us, or that that reality is unacceptably damaged, no more completely real that the table held up by three legs, needs an almost lunatic clarity of mind to perceive, especially when the adult and educated world is so practised at leaning on the table-top only in ways that don’t make it wobble, and indeed at dancing on it in ways that cause an answering quiver but require no fourth leg.

XVI

i return to the ‘light of what is created and existing’ and the ‘dark backdrop of non-existence’ of chapter XIV. that darkness resolves itself finally into non-existence and light into existence i don’t want to deny: but i think the mistake god made in creation was to suppose that, in the face of it, darkness would remain inert and not take up the business of creation on its own account. - it would be nice to be able to say with blake, who didn’t believe it either, that everything that lives is holy; but to take that simple and unified path involves either a ludicrously sophisticated acceptance of the shark’s teeth as gleaming with light or an equally sophisticated denial that the attacking shark lives. - it doesn’t seem sufficient to describe the energy of the shark’s attack as a gap in the fabric of a creation born wholly of light; any more than anyone can ever truly have thought sufficient the traditional christian explanation of evil as privatio boni, an absence of good. - better to admit that that energy of attack is a counter-creation, darkness learning from god the trick of creation for its own death-dealing purposes; and to say that when light does finally prevail in the created universe, when finally everything that lives is holy, then many modes of life there have been will not be found, will have dropped back into the vacuity of nothingness from which they came. - by contrast, what remains will acknowledge an origin in a quite distinct unformulatedness of energy which was the high god before creation all began -

XVII

the light is not a light thing, but it does weigh light, almost no weight at all - when one meets god one finds his touch upon you is like tree-blossom falling on your hair (so different from the heavy metal of the traditional christian expectation, all trumpets and profundity) - and the same is true of desire in its freedom wherever it is found: the amatory intensities of courtly love substitute for a lust not allowed its way the solemn, quivering affirmation of its importance and its presence - profundity is in the absence of enjoying what is praised - and by contrast the light of love actually being experienced makes sex the most casually occurring delight, lightly asked for, lightly given - and one should remember, when casual sex is being given a bad press, that its native function is not as the mark of a damaged, oppressed, furtive desire but as the mark of the undamaged and easy flow of it - casual and promiscuous sex is what god does, and the blossom on the hair is his friendly, smiling, direct propositioning - and this is a propositioning that doesn’t (as it does in the ludicrous christian account) compete with and challenge an inferiority of love between two human lovers, as in the mediaeval hierarchic distinction between heavenly and earthly love; but is a propositioning that understands how all intensity of delight felt for another spreads horizontally with the surface volatility of quicksilver and engages one in a network of other delight and desire - so different from the tunnel vision of reverential profundity alleged by the christian theologian or the courtly-love poet (whose writ still runs today) as the effect of true love, presided over, walled-in by, the chiming darkness of jealousy.

perhaps it’s true that, in the whole pattern of one’s various lives, there is one love which seems central; perhaps it is true that the high god has just such a central love among the human beings he has created (acting in this as in other ways no differently from the way he would like us to act); but certainly that centrality loses all sense of itself if surrounded by the space and silence of other prohibited desire, and becomes then instead an unlocated spot in an empty universe, the lovers fleeing away into the desert - the centrality of the love, by contrast, really knows itself by (to borrow a shakespearean word) its increase, by what it spawns, propagates, suggests - and it may be that, eventually, the whole of the restored universe will be a variety of central desires each with its network of propagated, spilling-over desires, overlapping in a great maze of light, the air full of blossom settling on hair - and, for god's sake, not spiritual blossom and spiritualised desire, but the ordinary, real, common or garden sort produced by real trees and real bodies.

XVIII

the language of physical sexual desire is the simplest and most powerful dialect a human being can command; and both its simplicity and power cause difficulty - the tendency of things is for a human culture to rescue itself from simplicity by complication and to turn the very varying degrees of mastery of that offered complication into a bastard version of power - the powerful people, in this newly designated sense of power, then become those who are able to live at the remotest remove from simplicity - they do it in our present world amid technique and jargon as once they did it amid dogma and ritual. the path by which one returns from this state of absurdity is one which allows a clear view of the lack of understanding of those immersed in complexity, the lack of subtle feel for the texture of real things - the thing is to negotiate with oneself and the world around a return from complexity before the internal pressures of the complexity themselves bring about a destructive and fearful collapse - in my third life i was the servant to the abbot of a small monastery on the north african coast from the age of five to nine, when i died in 576 on a sort of refuse tip - shortly before i died i watched the abbot himself die in terrible agony of body and even more of spirit, screaming against the horror of damnation his own complexity of dogma and practice offered one who had covertly not been able to live as an abbot was supposed to, the model of rigour for all his monks, answerable at the awful judgement seat of his unsearchably complex and unsubtle god for the state of himself and his community -

the abbot (whose name was, predictably and ironically, benedictus) had always been a simple presence to me. one has to have in mind that darkness can challenge light not only by being evidently different in the contours of its actions (thus complexity to simplicity) but also by identifying with and simply inverting the shape of light (thus the simplicity of war for the simplicity of lust); and the abbot for me was an overwhelming and undifferentiated terror - i was not aware, of course, of the torment of complexity in which he lived; he was not simply a bad man, he was complicatedly a bad man (still is, still is, ... but now suddenly no longer, no longer!) who attempted to present himself as an authority so simple to those under obedience to him as to seem inevitably real to them - but the psychological complexity (and all this was clear to me some time after i had died) of a system which made him grovel before the God while being the pattern of perfection to all his monks, multiplied a hundredfold by his inability to control the sexual desire he was taught to loathe (for it would take him straight to hell), created a vortex of terror inside the man different in shape but not in intensity of darkness from the terror he inspired, especially in the servant who had to live closest to him - and beneath all this, far beneath, as i realised much later, a degree of acquiescence in this situation, reaching back to before he had been born, which made him truly unreachable by any light thing - it was only as he came to die, as the added strain of imminent death and judgement broke open his shell, that the monks of his community saw their father in God for the first time as he was within, and there was paralysed horror that the devil had struck with dreadful effect at the very heart of the goodness and godliness of their monastery (as they saw it), at the link between them all and the God -

he died on the ground, in the position a monk was supposed to die in, but not in the physical attitude prescribed - neither the agony of his bowel cancer nor of his mind would allow a cruciform body yielding its spirit to the crucified God - and after he was dead and before even another abbot took his place the community convulsed together to try to identify the chink in the monastery's defences through which the devil had been able to make so terrible a way (for it was inconceivable to them that the plague was always from within) - the finger of accusation pointed at me as having been, as it were, the abbot's familiar - i was strikingly fair-haired, unlike everyone else; i had been given to the monastery because i was a bastard (no doubt my father some fair-haired celt from a distant place); and the abbot in his terminal raving had treated me with a public version of the mixed desire and disgust with which he had always treated me in private - they thought i was his devil - they were wrong, of course, but i believed them as well and consented to die not long after they expelled me with solemn curses from the monastery, expecting after death to return to the hell from which i had come -

it took a long time to wake from that imprisoning dream of darkness after i was dead into the simple power of light again; and a long time to persuade myself to try being born once more.

XIX

it would have been a lot better if the abbot had been in the ‘lowest’ terms a savage human being, because the ‘highest’ reasons for darkness, the most exalted context for it, the finest soil for its growth, produces the most noxious and penetrating form - one reads on pretty happily in montaigne’s essays, and suddenly there he is talking about the ennobling effects of war, the arrow of darkness gone straight through all his humanity because tipped with honour, with all the chivalric virtues - it is the special action of christian dogma and practice, and that of other religions, to tip the arrow of darkness with material of the finest quality - or let us change the image slightly and say that in the actual circumstances we live in, it is not light but an alloy of light and darkness that proves durable; and religions, beliefs of all sorts, tend to specialise in the production of complex and various alloys for all kinds of different purposes - the alloys are more efficient than darkness unalloyed, which tends to get up people’s noses; and light unalloyed is offensive for different reasons and in different terms.

when the abbot died, he found the darkness that made sense of his striving through his lifetime, because he was determined to find it - he has been alive many times since then, always intent on holding on to darkness with the golden net of virtue, whether religious virtue (mostly) or political virtue (more recently); but this last time, his energies for this enterprise seem less eager, his life messier, less directed, less credal - and his friends, who stand all around, watching life after life, begin to grin a little in relief as he gives up so long-lasting an effort.

it is ironic, really, that the kind of undirected, aimless life, the kind of drifting, which would seem to most observers alive at the same time a sort of moral decay, a lack of high ideal and purpose, should be in truth not the slow twisting of wreckage in the embrace of the sea, but rather the final magnetic turning of life to the light.

for so many people, when they die, the shock will be profound (though perhaps short-lived, soon replaced by a grin of relief) to discover who it was among those who were alive with them who were responding most energetically to the magnetism of light. - that ungovernably rebellious boy, that thiever and deceiver, that sexual transgressor, in fact knew in some way where the striations of the alloy were trying to force him, sniffed a false God in the air when it was presented for veneration, and swung towards the freedom of light with astonishing boldness and recklessness - if you had asked him what he was doing, then for sure he would not have said that, but would have used, or abused, the only language he had been allowed in which to speak of himself, and would have described himself, willingly or unwillingly, as darkly rebellious - but way beneath the imprisoned surface, with the ludicrously clumsy alloys of light and darkness he was busy with there, he knows what he knew with such clarity before he was born, that in the language of light he is trying for magnetic north.

XX

it’s that weekend in the year when french museums and châteaux are open to the public for nothing, the so-called journées du patrimoine, so to angers to the castle and to pick a museum - wrong choice really, the museum devoted to contemporary tapestry - i feel mournful about it quite soon after going in - cathedral-like silence, reverential gazers, sunday clothes, the thread of boredom, the tincture of futility, noli me tangere - i begin to think about the inside of the tombs of the pharaohs, or the total darkness of the deep caves in which neolithic paintings are found; some art reaches for transcendence by a kind of withdrawal that has preceded it - and which thus swirls round it when it is complete; to leave it islanded in darkness, or royalty, or reverence - but the easy path is too easy from this point, to suggest that art must not withdraw from life - it would not be honest of me to pretend i liked the sunday traffic and press of crowds outside the museum in angers any more than the sepulchre within - it’s not the process itself of withdrawal which seems dreary, it all depends what you are withdrawing from and to; the best withdrawal from the traffic seems not to the museum, nor the best withdrawal from the museum to the traffic -

a mile or two along the road from us, in the village of liré, is the modestly substantial house where the sixteenth-century french poet, joachim du bellay, spent his childhood, and to which he longed to return when trapped amid the splendours and the crowds of the busy life of his uncle the cardinal in rome - in one of his famous sonnets he turns to the thought of seeing the chimney of his own house giving out its smoke as he returns, turning the corner of the old road to see his domaine perched on the edge of the hillside above the little stream that flows down to the loire - i feel such sympathy with such a perch and such a stream down to the loire because so like my own mansio a bit further down river and a bit further back in time - with the cardinal it must have been like a dreadful combination of the museum of contemporary tapestry and the traffic outside, and the poet would have been in no danger of mistaking either of these forms of death for a life to be escaped to from the other - instead he looks to the place where he can at any rate more nearly be nakedly himself -

that the cardinal himself was also trapped between reverence and sight-seeing crowds there can be no doubt; no human spirit could freely breathe that air, but there is no knowing whether, like du bellay, he was aware of his imprisonment - i was wondering the same thing a day or two ago seeing the pope visiting france in his cathedra on the television screen at a catholic friend’s house, evidently tired, evidently ill - was he longing for his home, his domaine, and if so where was it? - i hope it was poland but i suspect he may have persuaded himself it was heaven, a christian mythic land he can certainly never have seen and so could not revisit.

the great thing about the triumph of light will be the overwhelming sense of déjà vu - no need for them to have rebuilt in the nineteenth-century the cheminée of his little house that du bellay mentions in his sonnet of homecoming, because effortlessly what is light will have survived, and no exalted spiritual survival this, nor anything to be wondered or gawped at, but ordinary evident physical survival, the universe dense with all the possible forms of life, du bellay's loire, masculine like the latin river liger, accommodated to the feminine one that flows past me now.

XXI

if the door handle doesn’t work, you can buy a new door, or repair the handle, or take to pulling open the door by other means - there is perhaps something feverish about getting a new door, the radicalism a kind of surrender to the hopelessness of the damaged situation; and a new door will always seem like a solution imposed rather than discovered, the new piece of wood not sitting too comfortably with the old lintel, like a house with replacement windows - of course, if the handle has never worked, then opening the door by pulling at the top will seem so much the usual, the intended way of doing it, and the strain on the hinges so much accommodated by an answering distortion, that only a visitor will notice that the proper handle is out of use - i would notice immediately because i seem to be by nature a repairer - the radicalism of the protestant conversion experience, together with its modern secular counterpart in the throwaway society, seems too much out of love with what actually exists; but equally it seems quietly monstrous to bodge up a way of carrying on with a damaged humanity by putting a hook of fear in at some convenient point to drag it along by a kind of traction that delicately created thing was not intended to afford - to pull by ear or toe and allow the rest of the body to scrabble along as best it may in the wake of the pull, with whatever humiliating caricature of proper movement, is what is mostly done - as though we were not intended to be free of fear -

the good repairer, by contrast, finds the point of balance of the whole system, the moment of central articulation, and considers how the freedom to do what it wills to do may be restored - the intervention the repairer makes will often be by something new or even novel to the system, but that newness will not be a replacement but an enablement - all this by way of saying that one’s tactics in the world should be those of the good repairer of the damage caused by darkness.

by comparison with the actual differing complexities of tactic needed to try always for the freeing of light from darkness, the strategic description of the engagement of these forces which from time to time i have embarked on so far in this book seems simple and evident.- what i must confess centrally for myself in the attempt at good tactics is that their needed extreme flexibility is arrived at by holding on to no principle, moral, academic, intellectual, sexual, fiscal, political beyond that single hook in the wall which is the resolve to have nothing to do with fear - and indeed that hook in the wall is itself not any kind of principle, but rather an erotic passion.

to remove from the spirit both fear and principle is to leave a great space for the poetic play of energy, for the variety of delight in things. if that play is to be as large as possible then one must be like the best of all chronometers in the best of gyroscopic systems, impossible to unbalance, either by a sudden shock or by a long dragging pull lasting hours, or months, or years - once off balance one loses the energy of delight, emergency lighting comes on, with enormous expenditure of rapidly ebbing energies some minimal response to the world around can be kept going - you see the pain and difficulty this causes hunan beings in the overset faces of children going to school on monday morning or the weirdly unbalanced smile of the salesman you’ve just bought something from, or the sudden utter weariness of a mother knocked sideways once too often by the sudden rush of desire of her little child - the first thing then is to rebalance one’s own gyroscope, to find again one’s delight and one’s energy - there’s no rule book to tell you how to do it, no maker’s instructions (perhaps surprisingly, some may think), just one’s own innate skill at managing one’s own light - and it’s no different for god.

XXII

the thing about a boy running in gyroscopic balance is the spacious poise amid all the possible shapes of sexual energy, normally denoted by fear-ridden specialised names like male and female, active and passive - the overwhelming attempt any society must make which values its unbalanced specialisms and the screeching energies they emit must be to make sure no boy reaches the fine pitch of his own native balance - and in this almost all societies are almost wholly successful. the high god laments it.

XXIII

it’s curious that when we speak in biological terms of highly specialised animals, or bits of animals, we see this not only as adaptation to a rare physical context, but as a form of survival bought at the expense of limitation, sometimes even comic limitation. the front pincer five times larger than the back, the three-foot tongue, the eyes on stalks, commend themselves more as the ingenious diversions of the circus ring than as anything one really feels easy about. for some people the same may be true of weightlifters, who have variously concentrated on certain physical features so that they may excel at picking up very heavy things. but perhaps relatively few people see intellectual specialisation as the developing and then flexing of the enormous pincer, out of balance with the rest of the body.

if you can pick up weights overwhelmingly well, you’ve got to have weights handily around to be picked up. if you want to be more than part of the entertainment industry, you have to persuade others of the importance of picking them up; overwhelming success would be to watch develop a whole new pick-up society - the ability creates the need, flywheels screaming off balance everywhere, to generate the music to accompany the pick-up mode.

no good giving the flywheel a tiny push to rebalance it; at that speed of vibrating revolution you might only destabilise things more; better to cant the whole world over a little to bring it true again to the spinning wheel and make the music pythagorean. -

the thing perhaps is always to be playing a larger game than the darkness, and with the kind of slightly obsolescent equipment that has lost the keenness of edge to enslave which fires with weird energy what is the state of the art. tactics this; but just never use the most modern equipment or the fire-new fashion. for that will come with the microsoft corporation’s undiluted desire to open fresh markets, to make fresh conquests of human territory. it’s the computer software that no longer excites them, that is not their market leader, which may turn out to be unexpectedly helpful after it has lost or been stripped of its brief moment of heady leading. nothing obscurantist about the use of the last technology but one; just a declining to be used by the tools one uses, a refusal to ask the questions they are programmed to answer.

the same with state of the art academics or intellectuals. they’ve devised the rules of the game so they’ll win it, or one of their number will. so be fiddling about with the counters from the game before, with the kind of unfrantic thoughtfulness that is not translatable into the failed desire to be state of the art oneself. a very vulgar thing to be.

XXIV

impossible to think if someone is always offering you the definitive answer to the question you didn’t ask, like the world wide web - for the very beginning of fruitful thought is to know what the question is one is asking and to see it’s not what you thought it was, not one of that battery of conventional curiosities with which an inhibiting culture makes docile an enquiring mind - the really limiting ignorance, as socrates might have said, is not not to know, but not to know that one doesn’t - and the more often one asks those questions to which there are snappy and authoritative answers, the less one may see the shape and extent of one’s ignorance - if training is about being persuaded to ask the questions to which there are known (or ‘known’) answers, then education is that kind of steady growth of mind and spirit which comes from an active contemplation of all one doesn’t know or understand, and of all the things about which one may be mistaken - there are no teachers in the act of being educated, only fellow experiencers -

and what one comes to hold as real in the midst and in the face of as broad an acknowledgement as possible of one’s ignorance, one holds to without clamour, without rancorous or oppressive insistence, because such a recognition of what one thinks real will be no more and no less than a recognition that one exists - for me, it is of the nature of my existence that i identify fear as the centre of darkness and i have no more need to clamour out that unalterable fact than to campaign in favour of my brown eyes - indeed, need not to clamour, even though i see the savagery and distortion of fear everywhere, because clamour will make a propaganda fiction out of what is real, and one must, for the sake of the light, be real.

which is not to be confused, of course, with always telling the truth - there are habits of truth-telling which constitute deep disguise and conversely (as who needs to be told?) fictions which enable what is real to emerge in the face of opposition - one arrives at reality, perhaps, when there is no longer any position to be taken up behind what is there, reality in this sense is the end of negotiation, the abandonment of manoeuvre - a condition of complete simplicity, i would have said, but that that seems to connote seriousness or heaviness, a certain strenuousness utterly unlike the ease i have in mind - and out of that ease can easily arise again the tactics and manoeuvres which may from time to time be necessary, because although one may say that what is real has no position behind it to be taken up, that is not to say it seems like some kind of final rigidity, final uncompromisingness, rather, it looks with a kindly eye on the extended detail of manoeuvre which were its outworks and may need to be again - indeed one may go further and say that after every encounter which had made it reach out - whether towards some difficulty experienced with oneself or with someone else, it will relax into simplicity and ease again, and this perhaps fifty times a day - it will turn with a grin to its lover again -

XXV

as i begin writing it is twenty minutes away from 1997 (or 2750 if one prefers the roman dating and thus to avoid approaching millennial fuss) - what is all this business about anniversaries and festivals? - actually there didn’t seem much fuss tonight because very cold outside, so almost no revellers, to judge from what can be seen from this flat in worcester quite near to the cathedral; and as usual we missed big brother’s revelling because of the unspeakable freedom of no television screen - not a freedom that would now be permitted if it were at all widespread, though the means of prohibiting the freedom would be subtle enough to be taken as the consequence of individual choice, like most of the prohibitions which ensure the weird flourishing of this late twentieth-century civilisation - orwell was so absolutely right about the television screen, and 1984 is well upon us in 1997 (midnight having come) - it’s worth having in mind that for all but a lunatic and criminal few, the world of 1984 was normal, acceptable, with effort getting ever better in spite of the intense challenge from enemies beyond our shores, even perhaps because of it, for that challenge furnished the opportunity for urging the workforce to ever greater efforts in pursuit of the final happiness.

which if not actually christmas, is bodied forth by christmas, which gives us in a yearly festival (one of a number: also new year, birthday, mother’s/father’s day, wedding anniversary, summer holiday, winter break, bank holiday, win the lottery) some inkling of what this society will be when finally it satisfies all human desire - or all that is left standing -

or what has been hoiked up on sticks to replace natural erection.- whereas the erection of the sun in the morning and of my cock in the evening are the circumstances that truly make me alive -

XXVI

by laying waste all around it, an energy which is shallow and trivial can seem to arrive at a certain unique intensity, as you can make a castle by digging away the sand all round - so there are experiences that come to seem like love by eroding the possibility of all other - a hundred or more years ago, a voice spoke constantly to newman, and in a somewhat different dialect to manning, urging them to the high places of spiritual achievement, and round about these high places, these eminences, the altars flamed day and night with sacrifice of all lesser things, the more cherished of these lesser things burning the more brightly for the satisfaction of the lunacy of the sanguinary deity who would be God by having no other gods - you can see the damage wrought by feeding bits of themselves to the altar flame of worship in the faces of these two cardinals as old men, the emptiness of human landscape devastated like the battlefield of the somme and lit by a certain ghastly energy of triumph - duty, self-sacrifice, ideals, the pursuit of the higher good come all alike in the end to a bloody sacrifice offered to the God in the midst of the death of all else - forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him - bind yourself to your love in the isolation of mutual esteem, icon to icon - but in reality god is promiscuous, and that makes all the difference; it certainly spells the end of all eminence - when those two cardinals died, it must have been for them like coming to a dinner party ludicrously overdressed - one wonders how quickly, with what difficulty or ease, they shuffled off the eminence; together, of course, with the sense of personal unworthiness that no doubt always went with it (for they were not renaissance cardinals, like some in rome) -

i remember someone telling me once that it’s particularly difficult when a pope dies. his friends have to rally round very strenuously to help counter the shock of reality not being as he supposed, no casting down of golden crowns before the throne on high, no crowns, no throne - i took my harp to a party but nobody asked me to play.

when paul vi refused the plan to have himself embalmed after death in the usual papal fashion, it might have been no more than a spectacular casting down of the golden crown, like the selling off of the papal tiara a few years previously; but perhaps it was more radical than that, not a spectacular refusal of the proper and customary honour, but a deep realisation that the ordinary way is best, a realisation which owed none of its power to a rejection of special status, was not in that sense a gesture at all, but a waking from the dream, not a continuing of it by other means -

for it is no good striving for the light by any of the means recommended by moralists in favour of virtue, by acts of the will or the developing of good habits. the light is a gypsy presence for so long as it must co-exist with the darkness, not to be wooed by the establishment, not travelling on metalled roads much, but across fields and by by-ways. if you meet it (and there are many by-ways, mostly not on the map), it will be by chance; that is to say, not by conscious design but by a delicate and decisive ordering of things whose shape and functioning one feels no urgency to enquire into - the only thing one might exercise one’s abilities in is speed of recognition and reaction to the light when it gleams, and the habit of not being surprised at the company it keeps.

XXVII

as a society moves from being deeply sexually inhibited to being shallowly inhibited, it may exhibit at its surface and conscious levels signs of moralising panic which could mistakenly be interpreted as a reversal of that process. by contrast, a deeply buried paralysis of fear may leave the surface relatively calm, with that slightly creepy feeling of something not quite natural given by well applied make-up.

it is true to say perhaps that societies differ in the shape and the extent of the geometric area they are prepared to abandon to sexual desire - and abandonment of a certain sort it is, because sexual desire is not easily converted into a currency of power that may be competed for, though that currency itself may artificially stimulate a kind of sexual desire or enable its satisfaction in other than the surrender of genuine orgasm - the gathering of power is compatible with the use of it but not with the squandering of it.

one may speculate that societies with large geometric areas given over to sexual desire will differ profoundly from those with small areas given up to it, and that the desire to enlarge the geometry will contrast with the desire to contain or diminish it. the society we live in is engaged at the moment in a very vigorous attempt to prevent an extension of the geometry to human beings below a certain age, and the more or less familiar arguments normally used for and against any extension are being deployed - if boys and girls could have sex with their teachers, what an undesirable use of power that might be on the part of the powerful in our social currency; but if it were sex desired on both sides, what an even worse dissolving of the currency of power itself would ensue - schools would become impossible - in the days when this particular extension was unthinkable, charles dodgson could be keen on photographing little naked girls; in days like now when it is thinkable children have to be energetically defended from what it is possible they might be - he would be put in prison now.

as the boundary line of the geometry is moving, whether it is moving in or out, witches, heretics and perverts are discerned beyond its limits - they may be the potential underminers of the line at present held, or the recidivists recently left behind, but in either case the energy of heresy flickers on the walls - when enlargement is taking place (as we see in religious terms, though the parallels are far from exact, in the sudden craze for finding and burning witches in the seventeenth century, as the enlightenment got under way) the energy with which perversion is countered by those who resist the change will be greater than when diminishment is taking place, because in that second instance the defenders have already essentially won and only mopping-up operations are needed - of course, once enlargement to the new point is completed, the perverts cease quite suddenly to be perverts; there are no more witches (once, in the eighteenth century, christianity had developed into deism) and no more homosexual lepers.

it may be that in western society at the moment the most dreaded thought (no longer safely confined to the pandora's box of freudian theory) is that everything is sexual; so that what is being resisted is not the mutating of the pound sterling into the eurodollar but the undermining of the entire currency system by sexual speculators.

such a relief, at any rate, to be clear that pornographers do it for money, like other business men, the criminals acquiescing in the conventions of life as much as the respectable.

XXVIII

sitting in a room with a boy, confronting the ordinary difficulty of saying I fancy him, without disturbing the surface of the water with the slightest ripple of consternation, I think of a sense or notion of my desire not as promiscuous (with the implication that has of passing uncomfortably across boundaries), but as ubiquitous - with john i've been reading some of ginsberg’s howl, and I feel emphatic that freedom is not to be found in the romantically tragic shadowlands of that poem’s imagining - that sexual freedom, for instance, should there be found amid the variety of physical and mental desperation which abounds in the marginal society of those only just about holding on to life is a curious (and no doubt unintended) tribute to the conventional morality of those apparently more successfully alive - by contrast I want to say that such freedom is not a prize bought at ginsberg’s price, not a heretical energy snatched at in the gutter, but a ubiquitous, ordinary, natural delight whose presence is discovered by relaxing into an honest account of one’s physical nature without either the fear which resists in the name of conventional morality or the fear which translates into bitter hostility to such a morality.

although i’ve been more than once described as a heretic, I don’t feel interested either in rebutting or enjoying that charge - better just not to play the game at all, neither to whitehouse nor to ginsberg, but rather to sit at what honestly seems the point of balance and interaction between all the forces within oneself, with the expectation that what will characterise such a point of balance will be a relaxed generosity towards what one imagines or supposes the point of balance of others -

one way, i suppose, in which i could describe a certain sort of uneasiness or reserve i sometimes feel with other people, is to suggest that in meeting these people i simply haven't found their point of balance; and that may on occasion in turn be because they either have not or will not -

this is not to say, i hope, that only what i fancy certain kinds of perfection can meet with ease; because it often seems to happen that two or more people will be able to balance themselves in each other’s company in a way or to a degree not possible elsewhere so that a great mutual freedom and generosity begins to seep out of the walls of each of the separate prisons.

XXIX

an extremely complicated intellectual or social or technical system may be kept going by human beings provided that a significant proportion of the manœuvre needed by it has become purely automatic, not thought about - the process of learning to drive a car is one of necessary desensitising of hands and feet to the various complicated co-ordinations required between them - by contrast, to have sex well with another human being, or with oneself, or to write a poem, or to paint a good picture, seems to ask exactly the reverse of the skilled driver’s change of gear.

it may be that, where the physical world is concerned, the evident and repeated success of a certain skilled technique makes it a ready and obvious candidate for the great substructure of unheeded, automatic skills - though even here the consciousness of skilled manœuvre may give an edge of delighted appetite to a mundane task: unlocking a door, drying a teacup, cutting a slice of bread, working a cash dispenser, opening a tin, riding a bicycle -

where the mental world is concerned, however, i wonder whether (to use a weary piece of automatic phrasing) we can afford the luxury of automatic response. for here the shadowy substructured mechanisms will be in a significant proportion mistaken, largely because the fact that they are mistaken will not be discoverable by the open and evident means of physical failure but only by the barely discernible distortion of spirit that may be the result of fifty years of belief in the doctrine of the trinity, or the principle that children should be seen and not heard, or the necessity of swimming trunks, or the importance of sport, or the desirability of high ideals, or the value of honesty - the distortions caused by such things barely discernible not because they are not grossly destructive of the shape and movement of the human spirit but because human beings can manage (and mostly do) to function somehow in their terms whereas no-one can ride a bike with a locked wheel.

what life in orwell’s 1984 has to say to us is that nothing should be automatically thought - or mental switches should be set permanently at manual, and most importantly when we are occupied with what (perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly) seems most unquestionable.

i suppose, at this roughly halfway point in writing it, i could say this little book could be thought, in the sense i’ve described, a manual.

XXX

just before his ship was wrecked off the scilly islands in 1707 because of disastrous navigational error, sir clowdisley shovell had had the ordinary seaman who had given him what was in the event the ship’s true location hanged for mutiny, because seamen in the british navy were not allowed, on pain of conviction of mutiny, to make navigational calculations reserved for their betters.

in some places in the american south during the slave era it was a seditious act for a slave to learn to read.

to stand up in the public gallery of the court and suggest to the judge that he was making a mistake would incur a conviction for contempt of court which would not be purged by any subsequent evidence that you were right.

the lesser should know less that the greater, or else where would we be? - it is a fundamental principle of our society that knowledge and power go together; and if knowledge confers power, then power must be allowed to confer knowledge. - knowledge, understanding, is in fact hopelessly compromised by being promoted, or paid more, or given titles; because then the power it has brought you must be allowed to give rise to the supposition that you have knowledge of a commensurate sort; for the fundamental act of power is to define itself, and anything pressed into the service of that definition loses all reality except as a definer of power - so even the things you really do know are bastardised.

if you had told shakespeare he was the greatest writer who ever lived, he would have fled the opinion and the consequences of it, because he is -

the problem for god is very similar -

XXXI

1. we really live out of the delighted desire within us, whose centre is sexual desire.

2. what we can benignly learn is to know more of the subtle, simple, orderly shapes of that delight, to be shown possibilities.

3. if we are faced with demands external to that delight, to which we cannot find a delighted response, it is vital to make any demanded response as sleepy and minimal as may be, so that our delight is not colonised by fear, either from the outside or by means of being made to produce it in the form of aggressive response.

4. the most usual form that that colonising cancer takes is the form of duty, and once established the cancer is difficult to shift; and itself produces by means of aggression secondary cancers inside the delight of others whom we attack with notions of obedience.

5. the end point of the cancerous transformation of delight is a kind of servile idiocy, which may however seem to be an intelligent energy used in the service of the company.

XXXII

i feel like thinking my way back to the beginning of creation, which is not a long way but only a few seconds, in consideration of what is to come after the intrusive darkness, which has briefly achieved consciousness in man and is no longer just a force within the created universe, has been drowned in light.

the high god, too, came to consciousness in the act of creation, came to birth of consciousness by giving physical birth. before that double birth is what god himself, of course, can give no sure account of - whether he was then the detritus of light, of existence, left over from a previous, failed struggle with darkness, with non-existence; whether there had been many struggles before; or whether in the midst of non-existence there had always been the possibility of existence which now for the first time moved - any one of these speculations leaves still the question about how that dormant or detritus state came to be, a question not answered but only evaded by saying (rightly) that time itself is part of the created universe, so that ‘before time’ makes no beforeish sense.

to turn with loyalty to existence, to light, however and to say that whenever, or wherever, that is nevertheless one’s element, is not so much to evade the question as to let it fade - rather as one’s life before being now in love fades into what is little thought of, something not vividly oneself.

when god speculates over the horizon of his consciousness, and talks to us about it, or points to the same horizon reproduced in us as we slip regularly into sleep (death is not such a horizon because that is a wakening to fresh urgency of energy in relation to darkness, against it, or temporarily and insanely for it), then what sense he has is of the fundamental unassailability of himself and that that unassailability is what made creation inevitable - this unassailable existence is not like the abstract certainties of mathematics or logic, which seem to need no embodiment to exist (but which are in reality created shapes); but is something physical; which is why all reality also is finally physical - the physical electricity of desire to exist it was that defined the boundaries of non-existence, made of the darkness of non-existence a directed and shaped tendency - in some sense, before all created things, the two forces owing their definition to each other, that by definition each was to be intent on swallowing up the other.

creation is the circumstantial evidence of the light of existence; and has become the ground within which darkness struggles for death, for annihilation. what goes for us by the name of evolution is the see-saw struggle between the two forces, with god learning all the time what may be done and what not, what are the best tactics, what proves a disaster. - our complacent notion that what powers evolution is the survival of the fittest is no more than our registering of the presence of the force of darkness in the struggle; for such an idea is of all things loathsome to god, for it embodies the idea that one kills to live, using the weapons of darkness in the service of light - that it has come to this in the unfolding of creation is because darkness like a massive distorting force in a magnetic field, has pulled the compass needles off their setting.

god came cautiously and late to the bringing of creation to his own consciousness in human kind because that would also, at a kind of second remove, afford a consciousness to the force of darkness - so with the creation of human kind and its will to be either light or dark, the focus of the struggle has become finally intense - the focus is here at this spot in creation and nowhere else, because after the first flinging ejaculation of matter in primal shape, it was necessary to leave it and to concentrate all effort at a single point -

each human life embarked on and lived is a conscious addition to the field of struggle. everyone knows before they are born exactly what their life will be; they can see how the energies they have, once they meet the energies into the midst of which they throw themselves, will work in this or that detail of shape, as to length and brevity of life, happiness and misery, all the great complication of what will happen, down to the tiniest picking-up of a match from the floor.

happy lives or wretched lives, and all possibilities between, may be embarked on as a flinging oneself in either on the side of light or of darkness, or of complex combinations in between those final extremes - for, to give only one uncomplicated example, a wretched life may either devote one to the love of annihilation or be a gauntlet cast down in the face of the worst darkness can do -

when darkness is swallowed up in light and is no more in this spot of creation then all can go forward, and where (as i’ve said before) there is no more death there need be no more repeated, reincarnated birth - the sexual energy, which of course is at the very centre of the struggle against darkness, will no longer need to be the prime instigator of the repeated rebirth that challenges repeated death, but can simply become the chiming with the primal ejaculation god made - there will be no death, no ageing, no need for all the physical apparatus required for birth - so that in their final long unending life in the physical creation, all of human kind, though nothing light in all their previous lives as either male or female will have perished or become dim, will be boys.

XXXIII

whenever we light candles on the table, all the children present try to blow them out, as they certainly wouldn’t have done two hundred years ago - candles are for fun now, not for any practical use - is this a trivialisation of their function? - well i think both yes and no.

the trouble with a history of usefulness is that it may colonise the nature of the useful thing and cause one to forget that, although created things fit together, they are not created for that sole purpose, but to be themselves and not other things - on the other hand, to remove the co-operative usefulness of something and let it just play the game of being itself may allow a slide from the independent to the virtually disregarded.

which is to say that in the co-operative endeavour creation is intended to be, no thing can well be without either its independence or its importance to other things -

we contemplate the territorial aggression of the world of living things and of human societies, and can easily forget, especially if we dignify such competition with the term darwinian, how lunatic a physical endeavour creation would be if it were fundamentally in competition with itself - the extent of the wreckage and waste caused by competition is the comet track of darkness criss-crossing the universe, and it should be little comfort (just as in human affairs) to the temporary victors in the struggle to survey the field of their hard won victory, even if they are proud that their weaponry now has an edge it would not otherwise have had.

it will be interesting to discover, in the end, what proportion of the skills we usually reckon to have developed naturally from the way things are, whether these are animal or human skills, are just the sharp edge put by darkness on creation for its own purposes, the shark’s teeth, which will be missing in the final count of all living matter, as being not real.

no doubt when we wake up one morning and darkness has gone, we shall be temporarily very surprised at what has gone with it, and shall find our familiar world pock-marked with absences - but soon, too, it will be difficult to remember such absences, or where they fitted in - because they never did really fit, the structure is complete finally without them.

XXXIV

how in practice can one act when someone’s contrary plan impinges upon one’s own? - it will hardly cause surprise to the reader that i exclude from the beginning what will be thought the usual tactic: fight - but with just as much firmness i feel i must exclude the opposite tactic of self-sacrifice, which is no more than the reciprocal of fighting, inhabiting the same world.

instead i want to suggest to myself that reality is large enough to allow the possibility of a plan which will adroitly meet the necessities both of mine and yours, encompassing them both, seducing them into co-operation; and that that large plan will be energetic and attractive enough to consign to the nullity of complete overlooking whatever bits of my plan or yours were the offspring of darkness.

as the high god grasps for the most generally extensive plan he can manage to conceive of, to hold the differing energies of the whole universe together and seduce all existing things into its largeness of desire so that the striations and spottings of darkness fall into oblivion, he is doing what i am doing when i try, in the face of the sudden desire of my little daughter, neither to sacrifice nor to be wedded to my own plan - if i’m quick enough, skilled and experienced enough, practised enough at it, i can slip intelligently into some larger gear which will save both me and her from mutually antagonistic entrapment in our own previous plans -

it is true, perhaps, that especially children feel desires, have plans, of a strength they are not yet very practised at yielding to a yet stronger and larger plan; but the usual procedure in such cases, to explain about give and take or advise against selfishness or insist on sharing, sets up a pattern of self-sacrifice which will very likely flip over into its reciprocal of aggressive insistence as the child grows to be adult, with an adult’s power to insist. so we find adults all about us who are trapped inside their own plans and wish for no other, but only for the power to ensure they prevail; or alternatively adults trapped inside someone else’s plan and devoting themselves to its ends.

and not noticing that the universe is bigger.

XXXV

impossible to conceive of life without movement; and can you have the whole fabric of movement in the universe without death? would there be, as wallace stevens suggest, a lifeless permanence without death, the ‘mother of beauty’, the boughs laden with fruit hanging always heavy in that perfect sky, the ripe fruit never falling?

i think the end of darkness, though it will be the end of death, cannot signal the end of passage, of the coming and going of things. how can this be?-

i think that, even though nothing dies that was ever alive with light, nevertheless time does pass, and that notions that in some sense it doesn’t are fanciful.- i think that living things are intended to change, but nevertheless resist death, by renovation, as this year’s flowers are the renewal and in that sense the survival of last year’s, as the cells of the body constantly renovate themselves.- inconceivably complex and yet almost simple-minded the great renovation will be after the attempts of dark death are ended - and then there will be an end of reincarnation, which will be seen clearly then as only the temporary stop-gap of multiple fresh starts in the face of the pressure of darkness, rather than the natural and constant renewing of the only start needed - reincarnation is temporarily the best gesture that can be made in the direction of renovation, for so long as the process of change is not a process of life but of death -

and what of all those reincarnated fresh starts when the dark pressure is finally off? well, each of them arriving by some route at what they were trying to renovate, and the renovation an expansive welcoming of even the most faintly marked path towards the light -

and what, in that light time to come, of the inanimate creation? is it different for the cart from the way it is for the horse?- well, fundamentally the physics of the inanimate creation are as for all of it, permanent; but the inanimate creation is intended to carry the flow of time differently from the animate and must be consciously repaired or remade or restored or invented freshly as the constantly renovated energies of the animate creation desire it - plenty of room in the universe after these first few seconds of creation are over for all the different desires and designs of the animate upon the inanimate, for all its conclusions, arrivals, discoveries, memories, ejaculations.

XXXVI

the reason i will eat fruit and vegetables, but not animals killed for the purpose, is my supposition that, just as the inanimate creation carries the flow of time differently from the animate, and doesn’t experience what we could define as death, so the vegetable creation is rather already in a constant state of renovation than experiencing death. and i suppose that, in eating and drinking, in living one’s animal life, one must try not to co-operate with or rely on any of the forms of death against which, for the moment rather desperately but soon triumphantly, the high god has set his face -

so i can reassure wallace stevens, i feel, that ripe fruit both falls and is eaten when darkness and death have had their day.-

how? - i want to say that what would constitute death for the vegetable creation is the death of the whole vegetating world we live in, because the ‘animal’ of the vegetable creation is the single one of the whole earth, and its variety, its variousness, this tree or that bush or that flower, is like hair on the head, growing and cutable.

if we note that in animal bodies cells renovate continually, it is nevertheless clear that this process of renovation is not yet powerful or extensive enough to counter death. one might say that in the vegetable creation renovation is much more powerful and extensive already, and only an onslaught upon it that entailed the destroying of the whole thing can be thought death-dealing.

we may perhaps then think of the vegetable creation as single, but of the animal creation as multiple in its multiplying of animals; and then of the human creation as in addition multiple in its multiplying of consciousnesses.

from the inanimate to the vegetable to the animal and finally to that specialising of the animal in the human, the process of creation reaches out, ever more vulnerable to the death-dealing darkness, ever more starkly and finely, delicately, asserting the quality of light, of life, against it. the furthest extent of the extension, the most defiant and the most vulnerable, is human like god himself, whose resistance to the darkness is desperate, last-ditch, inch by inch prevailing. perhaps the whole of creation is evidence of god’s determination, however, to survive.

XXXVII

there are many things proposed as important whose importance waxes and wanes in a way that relates to the context they find themselves in: passing the exam is vital in the moments before sitting it but hardly of much consequence if one suddenly remembers vividly the scale of the universe - i feel by contrast, however, that one should aim for steady state understandings that neither wax nor wane, that would, for instance, remain at the same angle and intensity in the mind as one was falling under a bus.

that sounds all very fine, but it has to be put together with the sense that one should have such delicacy and responsiveness of mind that every change of context, no matter how slight, will colour it differently - if we put this in slightly other terms, we say that the most undefended and conniving responsiveness to the beliefs, the moods, the passing whims of others must go with the most profound indifference to them, without the one stance being undermined by the other.

i am intensely and passionately concerned that whoever reads this little book should credit it, and also quite indifferent to the response of any reader - i try to write in a way which is as seductive as i can make it, and i put down nothing but what i myself want to say. i am open to persuasion on every topic, and my mind is entirely closed. i come away from a deeply interesting conversation with someone else with my mind full of it, and dismiss it instantly from my thoughts.

how is one to make sense of this? - it’s worth saying first of all that there is no actual difficulty, no real or experienced difficulty for me about the fact that these evidently contrary impulses inhabit my mind - such difficulty as there is is only in turning this into coherent sense for someone else, who may be either the reader of these lines or myself as with an objectifying consciousness i write them.

i think the things about which i am stubborn and uninfluencable are simple and radical enough not to make complex demands on the surface of the world - they colour and angle everything, but don’t fuss about with rearranging the detail of angle between things - as though to say it is like seeing everything from a walking stance ten degrees out of the vertical; or better say that what i assume is vertical looks ten degrees out to most other observers - so i can engage quite readily with the usual relations of things, as commonly understood, with just an arrière pensée which puts a patina of different possibility over everything and prevents final or primal engagement with those usual relations.

is that satisfactory as an account? - well, something to be said for it - it’s true to say that what i like and find easiest about my fundamental attitudes, and i have almost none that are other than fundamental, is their simplicity and brevity - and i don’t really mind about anything else, am prepared to speculate more complicatedly but without being apprehensive that the speculation might crash - come to nothing.

such speculation may derive from the fundamental attitudes but is not necessary to them, and so the mind is freed and in holiday mood as it investigates the rock pools and builds castles and river systems on the shoreline.

XXXVIII

a shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old - suddenly the sunlit patch of those words and that sound amid the tedious gentility of sidney's arcadia - and the pipe an appropriate instrument for a shepherd boy to play because very like the treble voice with which he would sing, the sound unqualified, unimpeded by anything chordal, requiring no effort, delicate but not subtle.

it’s as though that sound has not yet taken upon itself the weight of function, it neither announces, nor accompanies, nor designates; and the reaching of a pitch of energy which is quite free of such conniving is one way of describing freedom - the boy is presumably playing a tune that the pipe is capable of yielding, but not a tune written by anyone else -

the greatest works of art have often arrived again at the unbroken voice of not being about anything (which is at the other end of the scale from being meaningless), much less of being at the service of anything, except perhaps the sheep - good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest - that means everything in meaning nothing at the end of shakespeare’s play - put any pressure upon it and it would break, ask that it carry some significant hope for hamlet and it would turn out not to be able to do so - but leave horatio’s words in the open, doing nothing in their field of sheep, and they persist, they prove to have an undislodgeable grip on some reality not before encountered in the play.

most boys’ voices don’t actually break, they drift downwards, so that there is a point where the possible range of pitch is very great, from treble downwards - if that range could be kept, and could be kept in an unbroken sequence, then it would be as though the parts that could bear a load were in constant touch with the parts that could not - it is that moment where what is of use holds hands with what is of itself that defines the unity of creation.

but the darkness is a great interrupter, so horatio’s farewell to his prince, though undislogeable, is also unreachable from the territory he immediately afterwards turns to, the practicalities of politics, the necessity to clear away the mess.

XXXIX

the thing is to reach back past the immediate causes of events and feelings. the reason i feel like death today is not that i’m probably being affected by nellie’s spectacularly bad chicken-pox, but some other reason, whether i’m infected or not - we settle gratefully at times for the sometimes stylishly robust and unmorbidly uninvestigative secondary cause (a couple of paracetamol and a stiff gin is what you want!), and true, there is little more tedious than the knowing tracking back of immediate events and feelings to a remote cause; but i think both the morbidity and the tedium pretty much guarantee that what is being unearthed on such occasions is something fancied and not real - rather exciting and liberating by contrast to be on the right track back, like hearing the horns of elfland behind the morning traffic.

for myself i feel sure i hear the horns of elfland all right, and i’m certainly oppressed by the morning traffic and its immediate causes - but it’s the middle bit of the map that eludes me. and i have wanted in writing this book not to fill it, as i did the undefended heart, with the kind of creatures that make very promising middle-ground map material - with poems and philosophies and beauties and sayings - because though they are without doubt well and properly at home in the middle ground, i know about them and how they sit and how they point, and still the links between what is finally the case and what is immediately the experience are not really there, the middle bit of the map is too sketchy.

so in this book i have all the time confronted what i experience with what i fundamentally will assert, in hope that those two honesties will breed. i hope this book is the child of the union, the missing middle ground of the map.

XL

all this will be fanciful nonsense perhaps to some readers, though perhaps those readers will have given up long before this point - but i doubt whether anyone without strenuousness and an outraging of proprieties can make his two honesties meet on equal terms. what often seems to happen rather is that one or the other will extend itself and pretend to be also the other, because the strain of accepting disjunction is very great and it seems difficult to distinguish apart a genuinely founded sense that one is the same in the furthest reaches of the mind as in the most ordinary circumstances of life from a spurious and manufactured sense of it. - in that regard there is even a kind of admirable honesty about a man like bertrand russell, whose understanding of the ways in which war might be averted and of the importance of avoiding it had nothing at all to do with the trail of destruction he left behind him in his personal life, in which he was tyrant and destroyer.

but suppose for a moment that bertrand russell was a bad man pretending with very partial success to be good - what then becomes of my just having spoken about the spurious and the manufactured? - if the only alternative to ineffectual pretence at light is darkness, then pretence is obviously the thing. for just as light is to be discouraged from using the weapons of darkness, no matter what the pretext, so the opposite holds as well; and darkness is to be encouraged to use the weapons of light upon any pretext.

or say more. just as physicists used to say that nothing in the universe could travel faster than light, so i would like to say that there is no higher morality than the use of it, and no failure other than the failure to use it. in the competition between the admirably honest prince of darkness and the schemingly dishonest doer of light, there is no doubt who wins. to abstain from doing light until one can do it honestly reminds one of the worst excesses of a christianity which would always value an upright position in the complex moral intrigue over the half-accidental pushing forward of the white counters.
the light of the high god is like aids in reverse and if you dabble in it, no matter how tentatively or furtively, it will eventually, perhaps after many years or many lives, break down the immune system of darkness.

XLI

oddly, it seems for me that the way to achieve some sort of family relationship between all the things i think is to follow no chain of thought very far (hence these very short and independent chapters) -

i suppose i say chain of thought advisedly, and i may have in mind those immensely long and interconnected logical chains with which a philosopher like bertrand russell encumbered himself in his search for freedom. the chains of logic are difficult to break free of once one has given oneself to them, are immensely tough, and very thin, like piano wire - not everything in the world can be done with piano wire, even though it is very strong; more particularly, the capaciousness of what one wants to say and mean has to be sacrificed to such a strength. and one can hardly hope for a family relationship between all one says or thinks unless the whole family is always allowed to be present at any thinking or speaking.

nevertheless, a surge of thought will often move ahead of the family game and get open space for itself, which is all very well for a while, and can be terrifically active and agile for lack of the accompaniment of other human activity, as when a gymnast succeeds in a spectacular manoeuvre because she doesn’t have to be simultaneously carrying home the shopping - but it’s no good carrying on with the manoeuvre for too long; the shopping has to catch up, or no one would eat.

XLII

a clump of flowers seeded itself in the garden a little while ago and sometime after i was pleased to be told it was wild camomile - but how wild are you if you submit to a given name? so let the flowers not become speech and what are they? - assuredly god didn’t say ‘i will create wild camomile’, although he knew one day i would learn that’s what it was -

for like all human beings i am surrounded by life that is less conscious of being alive, so i both lend and impose upon it my own sense of life, of how it is divided up, graded, named, valued. but how to lend that sense without imposing, without intruding on the proper ignorance with which plants and animals live and die.

a little mouse has just died in the house here, and tomorrow everyone will be very upset. i think there is no falsity of sentiment about treating the death of a mouse as a human death, for finally all life is in common cause against all death; but the connections that hold the mouse at one with the common cause must be of the most delicate if they are not to enchain it, colonise it with a meaning it never knew nor cared for.

the more passionately one is against death, the more delicately one must be against it; and the more resolutely one opposes it, the less moved one must be by it. the death of little animals allows more than human death the kind of opposition which expresses itself in a turning away from the thing as of no significance. the dead camomile flower in my hand even more (if it is so that this is just, as it were, hair cut from the head) presents death in a form which emphasises it as of no significance; and in that sense the camomile lights the way for us to the universe where death shall have no dominion - and let the mouse go on before us too, like catullus’ girl’s pet bird qui it iter tenebricosum; and let me give it as delicate, as playful an obit: died in worcester 28th july, 1997.

XLIII

to be entirely unconcerned about a death and to be intensely engaged against it are two attitudes that may share the same turning from it; a deeply felt inability to cope with death and a deeply felt ability to cope with it may share the same turning from it - and we must note, as in distinguishing sometimes two identical phrases at different points in a poem, that the widest difference of attitude is carried by the most minimal distinction of feature, a slight emphasis or hesitation, a fractional pause or lack of it, or that distinction itself, indeed, between hesitation and pause, the one uncertain, the other most certain.

and one must think of darkness and light, not as widely separated, but as so fundamentally disjunct that they can be found at times occupying almost the same ground, using the same words, offering the same perspective - the thing is to have a nose for the distinction between the two rather than an argument for it; the argument can come later if it must, but cannot work so quickly or securely as the nose, which may detect in an instant, as it were, the false sound, the tiny mistake a native speaker would never make, in an otherwise convincing manner of things.

there is detecting and detecting, of course, the dark and the light, distinguished not by their acuity of perception, but by a certain final seriousness leading to moral tyranny in the dark, and a certain final levity in the light, a certain liberating sense of ‘well, who cares anyway?’ - a certain total lack of the authoritative.

the struggle is not bunyan-like, not in that sense a struggle at all, where light disengages itself from darkness not with a speech or an uphill climb, but with a flicker of the eyelid, the slightest movement of the right shoulder - you have to watch the eyes of god very closely and see the odd moment of grin in them - he doesn’t on occasion actually say much.

XLIV

it has come to be the fashion to admire professionalism in almost all areas of human skill except love - the professional lover is looked down upon as much as the amateur historian - what damns the whore is that he or she does it for money and what damns the amateur historian is that he or she doesn’t.

i don’t want to be too sniffy about coin: by establishing the goal of attraction somewhere outside the boundaries of the human skill being exercised it may not only subtly undermine the intrinsic, intra-mural reasons for engaging in it but may also at times profitably undermine intra-mural hesitations and inhibitions - so that money may be a great enabler of sex and historical research amongst those afflicted with defect of desire or doubt as to their capacities in these fields.

the payment of money has a shifting, uncertain quality about it: which is why one feels uneasy and suspicious when it is proclaimed as the great betrayer of properly human activity in the case of whores and held up as the great test and assay of excellence in the case of academic pursuits that someone will pay you large sums to do it -

of course if you are a girl prostitute or a rent boy or a reader of seventeenth-century pamphlets out of a liberated desire to be such, then that desire itself is enough to encourage all the skills one is capable of acquiring, and money is a firmly extra-mural though necessary appendage (one must live) - and by contrast if you are a whore disgusted with sex or a scholar bored silly by footnotes, then only money brought right within the walls in generous amounts may make it seem worth while continuing -

to live on a life-support machine, in this case a financial one, is perhaps better than being dead but no substitute for being alive; and it would certainly seem very odd to be so wedded to one’s life-support as actually to prefer it to the natural functions. the natural functions are so much more various, flexible and graceful than whatever is afforded or enabled by artificial means - no matter how slickly the professional operates, or to what exacting professional standards, nothing can disguise the limitation of the complexly human, the zimmer-frame-like movement of his high-powered concerns.

XLV

kate put two ants in a jar to look at them, and within moments one had half eaten the other - we felt the horror of it and tried to separate them, but couldn’t.

but our horror small in scope by comparison with the helpless baffled horror of god when he first saw the effect of darkness on the life he had made - with the ants we thought for a second or two that they were playing with each other, especially because we’d put two in so that one alone wouldn’t be lonely - so god may have persuaded himself for a second -

as nothing could have convinced us, no different or larger frame of reference, no fancied good, that there was anything other than horror in one ant eating the other, so i suppose there is no frame of reference which will commend darkness to god, the maker of light.

there is only the resolution to learn nothing of its ways, even when it seems impossible to live without doing so - what to do about the scorpion that runs straight at you, or the nest of wasps in the roof? what to do when there is no place of retreat for harmless life?

if this were all made into a metaphor for human society then something might relatively easily be suggested, some course that was neither savagery nor its companion, servility, that was neither hostile nor deferential - but the implacable mindlessness of the running scorpion and not only that but its curious unimportance in the whole scale of things, resists the sophisticated facility with which a course of action relating to human beings might be suggested - as darkness climbs the scale of subtlety it becomes more and more ingenious, often more and more difficult to distinguish from light; but by the same token it becomes more vulnerable to the subtleties of light - so just as death is said to spread from the feet upwards, so it may be in the end that light will spread from the head downwards; and god will have been right to take the risk, even in the presence of darkness in creation, of making human beings -

but then the question of the running scorpion remains - and do we simply move out of the wasp-infested house? - perhaps after all our human metaphor will serve us, that we should be neither savage nor servile, that we should counter but not kill - we can share our living space on earth with any creature that will share it, but a creature who would commandeer it must be restrained from doing so.

this restraining energy, i feel it important to say, is not a simply milk and water version of the savage response, but is in its own right fully and totally energetic, totally and quietly ruthless in the defence of light. the absolute refusal to be pushed around, the absolute refusal of self-sacrifice, however, has nothing in common with any savage assertion of dominion - it is self-sacrifice which is the sudden, abrupt flip-side of savage dominion, the deference towards fancied authority going neatly with hostility to those one has fancied authority over; or, to return to the scorpion, the willingness to kill it close kin to the fear that flees it.

wherever self-sacrifice is recommended, look for the teeth.

XLVI

‘we can share our living space’: easy words, one may hear the rabbit or the lion or the salmon muse, from human creatures whose simple abundance and whose modification of their environment is a kind of savagery towards us, even if we do accept that they might no longer kill us for sport or for food -

that the abundance of successful life itself constitutes a kind of savagery is a strange thought to accompany one’s being on the side of life against death - but just as the shrinking of the mind away from the possible extent of human freedom is one shrivelling effect of darkness, so is the confining of physical life into spaces too small for it. in the universe at large there is to be enough space for all the various abundance of living things, and there are to be no empires, so that the relation between one living thing and another will be a looser weave than it is now, involving no sacrifice, voluntary or involuntary.

and perhaps one should try to cultivate now (even at the cost of a little artificiality) the habits of response that will be appropriate then - to stop acting in the darwinian manner bred in the seething constriction of a single spot and second in reality, surrounded on all sides by nothing alive.

in this seething spot, what passes for the design of things are relationships of hostility and dependence (dog eat cat, cat eat mouse, how wonderfully it is all planned!) created by the almost intolerable pressure of constriction at the outer limits of the vessel of life - and to learn one’s habits of life from these circumstances is, as it were, to elaborate a set of engineering principles to cope with a gravitational force one hundred times greater than was intended when the physical materials of the art were devised.

even as one builds one’s heavy bridges and one’s armoured bracework, one should build in the imagination the light and delicate things that will serve to cross by in a hundredth of the gravity, so that (because the imagination can be the first arrival of an altered reality) steadily one’s physical step lightens, lightens to a degree that people find perhaps momentarily alarming and then either seductive or foolish.

XLVII

in the latin i speak a caterpillar is already pretty much what it will become, is a papiliellus, a tiny butterfly - whereas in english, the verbal groundwork conspires with the visual difference between two stages of a butterfly’s life to allow it to be always a delighted surprise that the one should become the other. do i have a taste for the miracle of transformation; or do i prefer the quieter, sturdier sense that that is what happens in butterfly life, they start green fat and wriggly, and end coloured diaphanous and fluttery? -

i grant that it is one way of expressing a delight in beauty to exclaim that one would never have supposed it; but it’s almost as though that very exclaiming is a way of denying a regular place to beauty in our circumstances - and so perhaps better to stop pretending there’s a miracle when there isn’t, to stop being surprised that little butterflies become big ones - beauty is what you have a right to expect from a caterpillar, and it is no proper part of the reaction to beauty to pretend to be unfamiliar with it -

this is not intended to sound sour, nor to deny the sharp edge of delight; but more to suggest that the sharp edge of delight doesn’t have to be seldom experienced in order to remain sharp; that there is no need to pretend delight is unexpected in order to keep it sharp; that one can live accustomed to the sharpness of delight, drawing one’s energy from its edge while seeing it always coming -

it’s rather like birthdays - in the feeble way of our culture one day in the year suddenly transforms itself into a surge of excitement and pleasure, and can only do so if all the others stay more or less dormant - i want the contrary of this: that this single little green worm should be seen in company with the billions of others, all about to grow up into the air - artificial miracles, like birthdays, seem like father christmas land; and one has no need of their falsity. every day of one’s life begins in the dark and grows into light, every caterpillar grows into a butterfly; one should hold firmly to that intense habit of delight.

XLVIII

i feel i must return to the business of self-sacrifice and try more effectively to lay the spectre of its nobility - put the opposing case as strongly as possible: the nations war together each for its own ends; the clamour of greed arises on all sides; the seizing of short-term advantage is commonplace; children squabble about who is to have the prize - and there rises above all the maturity, the restraint, the orderly calm of one who does not seek his own ends -

and what i want to insist is that the majesty of noble disinterestedness, the forgetting of one’s own immediate desire, is as surely a way of darkness as the squabbling idiocies of greed - to be blind to one’s own desires is as bad as to be blindly committed to them.

if desire is, as i suppose, the evidence of being alive, then when the child says ‘just one more go on the swing’ one cannot afford to suppress one’s own unwillingness any more than one can afford to snuff out the child’s desire - to snuff or be snuffed keeps all desires small; whereas if one desire copulates with a contrary one, each will grow by being seduced into the world of the other - the negotiation between contrary desires is not to be for an instant thought of as a sophisticated version of winner and loser, or indeed as the game of let’s all be losers - it’s got to be the game of let’s all be winners -

on the occasions when i feel myself drawn somewhat down the dark road of self-sacrifice (that road that eventually, as yeats says, makes a stone of the heart) i feel the most overwhelming exhaustion; this because of missing the vital turning (sometimes almost impossible to find when children are concerned, whose map of their own desires will tend to be drawn with little detail) to a direction all are travelling in - that there is such a direction to be found makes sense of the unity of the universe (though darkness will do its best to destroy that unity), whereas even a momentary supposition that in this case it is either you or me introduces a hideous disjunction, a life at the expense of death.

if i felt that, in the question of another go on the swings, it were really ever you or me, i would drop this three parts written book in the fire as wholly mistaken - but that is not to deny that the finding of the common route which is neither self-denial nor denial of the other is the most complex of the daily realities i face - the more complex because the possibilities of desire we are working with are chipped, truncated, bowdlerised, vulgarised, harried so that often they are scarcely recognisable as human at all, like a walt disney film version of some human experience.

almost the first move one must make, perhaps, in the re-negotiating of conflicting desires, is to recognise that they are more extensive, more disreputable, more interconnected with others than the piddling set of standard desires we are presented with in quiz shows or newspapers or sermons as an account of the reasons for being alive.

XLIX

in sketching a face, the tiniest flicker of the pencil at the wrong point, the smallest mistake in the shape and direction of a line, can mean the difference between a striking re-creation and a worthless, labouring failure - so too with the nature of things, i suppose - if one is right, one is right by a hint here, a touch of the pencil there, that suddenly brings the whole alive and into focus.

i find noses particularly difficult to do; and they provide in their centrality a good analogy to the centrality of sexual desire - everything begins and ends with such desire, but of course at many angles of the human spirit, just as of the human face, that centrality quite properly doesn’t seem central - if one tried artificially to make the nose central at whatever angle of vision one saw the head, very odd distortions would ensue - just so with certain distortions of sexual desire when it is not allowed the gracefulness of knowing its centrality but has it nervously or desperately proclaimed - the central thing, like the central god, is not to be thought of as despotic.

many less startling but still sharply notable nasal distortions of desire occur, turning the otherwise human features into a miserable, caricatural bodge - they are all in one way or another to do with sexual desire feared, the fear either causing the nose to be diminished almost to vanishing point or emphasised, with desperate necessity to breathe, at some off-centre or marginal point - the fear producing a kind of cordon sanitaire round the nasal protuberance, to ensure that other parts of the face need to acknowledge it as little as possible, so that by consequence the nose begins to operate in a kind of savage isolation from all other facial concerns -

when i say that everything begins and ends with sexual desire (and of course i intend no safely metaphorical or unphysical nose here, but the real physical thing) i think most of the objection to that would arise out of a sense of nasal functioning that in one way or another had lost the fine and delicate and non-mathematical centrality of this feature in a fine human face.

and just because most human beings, amid the damaging darkness that shadows everything, have to walk about with damaged features, with noses smashed or distorted or painted red or surgically removed, or covered with spiritual patches, little pieces of cloth sewn with improving mottoes or edifying pictures, there is no reason for the skilled artist, in love with the human face, not to restore the reality he knows should be there - draw that face as it should be, as it plainly so wants to be, as it delights to be.

L

and as creation becomes steadily more conscious, steadily more willed and less merely automatic; as one arrives at humanity, as humanity itself tries more and more to free itself into the willed and the self-organised, away from the cradle of automatic and obligatory functions and protectors; so sexual desire is no longer simply used as a means of ensuring reproduction, no longer the province of automatic bodily functions, but is more and more manual, the camera settings not automatic as in the cheap throw-away but everything to be set by hand, exposure time, aperture, focus, as the circumstances suggest - no longer only possible to have sex in the way provided for by the automatic functions, the automatic secretions and lubrications, but we come into the larger arena of what is possible by human thought, care, effort, preparation, and so into the arena where god has sex - god being wholly manual, one supposes (at least by this time) and no longer in any part the cheap automatic with its simply envisaged set of possibilities and its predictable and satisfactory but not stunning result -

and so one bewares of arguments about various kinds of sex, that they are ‘against nature’, for this may only mean they are not provided for in the automatic programming -

of course, one must put the other side of the picture too - there is a certain kind of photographer who fusses so much about his preparations, his tripod and light meter, his lenses and filters, that one feels inclined to suppose the picture is a bit low on his list of priorities - one shouldn’t forget that the snap of the shutter and the entrance of light are really the thing, with neither too little nor too much thought beforehand.

no rules about beforehand, as usual, only a sense when the picture’s done of whether it’s as good and alive as may be or not - and all manner of things may conspire to influence one’s sense of things -

there are times when proustian life seems a lunatic evasion of the central energy of being alive, and times when proust seems by his elaboration precisely a celebrator of being alive - the crucial thing about a passage in proust, perhaps, is whether a simplicity survives amid and animates its elaboration, so that the elaboration becomes a celebration of simplicity, so that subtlety and delicacy of the most fragile and sensitive kind can be understood to be a simple matter; not, for god’s sake, a matter of art - so sex

LI

i’m reminded by the last two words of the preceding chapter of browning’s caliban upon setebos, in which shakespeare’s caliban speculates that the divinity he knows of, his dam’s god setebos, may remarkably resemble caliban himself - so He.

no doubt, if i were proust, i could write thirty pages upon the way in which my last two words were prompted by a memory of the repeated phrase in browning’s poem, and upon the way in which the last two words evoked the memory of browning from the past - no doubt in some way the memory and the evoking of it worked together, and we don’t live in the temporal simplicity of either the one case or the other at any one moment; but i find myself able to be interested in such a complexity while supposing it just to be a simplicity i’m not familiar with, so that it doesn’t fill my mind with tangled knitting -

the very short chapters of this little book have been a way of abandoning the tangled knitting sufficiently often to preserve the clear simple spaces inside oneself from which may arise the movement of a cat and not the straining (whether ‘successful’or not) of the competing athlete - so also with the dashes which make up so much of the punctuation of what i have written - i feel that if these few pages can’t be read with a certain unsurprised ease then they are better not read at all.

which is so much as to say i intend no effort at changing anyone’s mind from the way it wants to be - i think such an enterprise is hopeless anyway - rather i am trying here to make a map of the arena i might share with someone of essentially like mind, a sketched-in map with tricky bits suggested but not lingered over (like noses) so long as they seem about right - i’m aware that the matter of reality is of the most profound and delicate subtlety, that the relation of a single human being to what surrounds him or her is a matter for hundreds of fine sketches by the most skilled artist (unlike the relation of an animal to what surrounds it, which could be done in a few) - but if we are essentially of like mind most things can be left to themselves to be understood; and if we are not, then things are too delicate and subtle to be conveyed -

LII

what i have just said still seems true, but nevertheless i do think it misrepresents the scope of the intention with which anyone must write - and more particularly it misrepresents the total conviction with which i am writing, the conviction that what i say is right.

if it is, then it’s no good being wrong, and not even the most positive and generous thoughts about the play of different opinions can make it seem worth being wrong for -

it would not be honest for me to pretend i don’t identify my own fundamental sense of things with the light, and contrary things with the darkness - that being so i can really only devise a place for what one might call the classic virtue of toleration by various ingenuities; and in any case my supposition about fear, that one should never in any way, even the slightest, make use of it, that it is the fundamental contagion of darkness, seems to relieve one of the necessity of the subsidiary virtue of toleration, whose existence is only necessitated by an acceptance that in some cases fear may be used. that may also be true of a lot of other virtues.

it is not tolerance, i think, to delight in the clash of opinion about superficial things with someone whose fundamental set of spirit you are in harmony with, but rather an appreciation of the variety of possibility - and by contrast no quantity of agreement about superficial things will fudge over the fault line in a relationship with someone whose set of spirit is poison to you. in such circumstances one accumulates superficial agreements in the rather hopeless attempt to trigger off something better -

to be a fool, perhaps, is not to know what one’s fundamental set of spirit is; to play the fool is not to want to know - foolishness has nothing to do with intelligence and is compatible with the highest levels of education. it might arouse in one either a kind of temporary despair about the particular life being led, or a sort of respect for the adroitness with which someone is avoiding the pressure of darkness upon him: pretend it isn’t there - to be a fool born may not be, as ben jonson supposes, always a disease incurable, but sometimes a manoeuvre of great skill in the face of what otherwise seems the unavoidable embrace of darkness. to live a foolish life of this sort may be a brilliant finessing of the dark.

what powerfully conditions my thought is the supposition that darkness is never final, even though it may have been primal.

LIII

from foolishness to failure - most of the enterprises in the service of which success is demanded are themselves so crass, so myopic, so wrong-headed, that the button labelled failure might be re-labelled ‘release to the light’ - i have in mind a french friend of mine caught in the clutches of a successful academic career, with all the fear-laden miasma of form-filling, report-making, decision-implementing, leadership-giving, appraising, reproving, responsible nonsense about him on every side - if only he had failed to become a professor - if only now he could change the habits of half a lifetime and have a good breakdown, or take spectacularly to drink, or in some other way give grave concern to the fools above him they would devise a way of getting rid of him.

because for this friend of mine the situation is too serious to be serious about; no responsibly thought out way of escaping the trap exists - and perhaps if the conscious mind cannot be persuaded into the jokiness of failure, of ‘failure’, then the body will be, and will suddenly, at the most solemnly inopportune moment, let him down, so that he falls over and is at rest.

perhaps the body is less easily seduced into darkness than the mind, so that the gradually increasing rotundity of the steadily more important man is a ribald comment on his enterprise, and the body become a grotesque jest peeks out constantly from behind the decent veil of a well-cut suit to cackle at the fine pretensions of the mental and moral life.

and that grotesque jest holds hands with the physical beauty of youth, is in the same way of wisdom, rejoicing in the inextinguishable urge to freedom that youth and beauty with no job and no status, no career, no success, no prospects represent.

LIV

a most beautiful late autumn morning today - and i wonder, sitting here, whether it adds to or subtracts from what i have said or makes no difference to mention it is a sunday - some aspects of human organisation, for good or ill (and it may be either), seem to make less impress upon the natural world than others - to say it is an autumn morning resonates with the position of the sun; to say it is a sunday seems simply to have little to do with it.

sometimes one seems on the side of light by abandoning the human organisation for the natural, and sometimes by emphasising the authority of the human: it all depends upon whether at that moment nature is simple and in a blue sky, or alternatively red in tooth and claw - there is no attitude towards the natural world, i think, that will automatically always produce the right answers, because the effect of darkness upon it is itself not patterned but spotty and chaotic.

and if that is true, as i suppose it to be, of the effect of darkness in general, then it means one must always be making fresh practical judgements, that one can never simply, as it were, read off the answer by the slide rule of one’s life - the decision for light, or indeed for darkness, is an elementary one and will not in itself act as much of a guide to the complex casuistry of things - one needs practice, more and more of it, to go on distinguishing the perfect from the diminished fifth as the full orchestra is playing, especially when (as is inevitably so) you are one of the players -

and just as, in music, the tiny semitone of difference between those two intervals takes one from best to worst, so in the rest of life what seem the slightest differences can embrace the infinitely great transition from light to darkness or darkness to light.

to have a sense of the vastness of the transition and of how unobtrusive the step may be that makes the passage perhaps encourages one’s attention in the way the best poems do, where the great issues and the small sounds claim a conjoined attention, neither having to yield to the other - “pray you undo this button” - and as shakespeare, with his sometimes sloppy time sequences and untidy plotting, seems to acknowledge, once the vital things are heard with great clarity in tune or out of tune, no other kind of accuracy much matters.

god wears an ordinary wristwatch.

LV

when someone says something to me, proposes something as true or desirable, i think i ask of it only how long the note of what is said goes on sounding inside me - there’s no mileage in something being true if it has no life within you, and to subject one’s inner resonance to the external authority of what will not resonate with it, is to live one’s life as a cracked bell, making a dull sound. - the obverse of this is to watch and see how all that one knows is in harmonic relation together (and let no one object that one can’t see harmonics, because seeing is itself harmonically related to hearing).

the old notion was that the heavenly spheres vibrated together in a musical perfection.

*

i broke off writing at this point last night, and now something has happened this morning which takes its place - i was up before dawn, at 6 o'clock, to do a couple of hours, as usual, on the nineteenth-century letters i’m editing - i sat down at the desk between 5 and 10 past six, amused that i wasn’t as tidily prompt to the hour as i usually am - set out my work, with the 3 sheets of paper which are organising it (and which are so fundamental to it that i have copies) - ticked off on one of those sheets the work i’d done yesterday and turned to consider the letter i was to begin today - about 20 minutes later i had to check (for a cross-reference) the sheet i’d begun by ticking and it wasn’t there - i hadn’t moved from my desk in the intervening time and a quietly thorough search (quiet because i had a copy!) failed to turn it up - i made a second copy from the surviving copy to replace the missing original - and now, later in the day, i’m thinking about all this.

i think the original disappeared in more than the casual sense of that word - and that physical energies are abroad in the created universe which we are not aware of - when something surprisingly arranges itself very neatly, we are used to the vague supposition that there must be some kind of providence; but it is less often that a shaping intervention seems to have occurred that, as it were, changes what has already happened, already exists; and one can see that especially such a shaping intervention re-organising the already existing fabric must be very rare if our own sense of competence with the world around us is not to be much undermined.

the hint, however, that there are parts of creation other than those whose operation we are familiar with, and that these other parts may occasionally impinge upon ours perhaps will rather adroitly serve only to make more sophisticated and flexible and intelligently ironic and delicately provisional our own common means of engaging with reality.

and certainly, if the change of moral and psychological attitude i have frequently been occupied with in this book is to be anything more than a credal curiosity, it must both have physical consequences, and attract towards itself physical energies of a radically transforming kind, a radically mutating kind, which will reveal unsuspected possibilities.

i cannot in the end feel much interest in the kind of experience religions offer, of a creed that aspires to have influence in the human moral and psychological sphere but that leaves untouched the physical reality beyond. to be on the side of light means for me an assumption that the shark’s teeth will sometime mutate; and i take heart as a consequence from the disappearance of my piece of paper.

LVI

perhaps it hardly needs saying to human beings who must accept it except in the most diaphanous and strenuously unreal parts of their minds, that all reality is finally physical - so that we need not invoke for those parts of physical reality separated from us, to their and our own cost, by the action of darkness, any notion of the supernatural, that wholly fictitious creation of religious activity.

there may be parts of the universe in which the physical energies are spread out thinner, as it were, with more nothingness in the mix, more death in the mix, than in our parts; and perhaps we may call the physical energies of such parts energies of the spirit - whereas in our parts, which survive in recognisable form for us so long as death does not visit them to dilute their density, greater solidity seems the order of the day - but neither the densely physical experience of living without death in the mix nor the tenaciously surviving experience of living with it, can afford to lose touch with the other, for dense life is, in the present condition of the universe, temporary, of short duration, before it yields to the approach of nothingness, and spiritual life is a great survivor, of long duration, because it has yielded so far to nothingness.

these competing disadvantages make a single preference for the one or the other physical life very short-sighted - but the sharp differentiation between the two forms also suggests how there may (will) come a time when it will be the sudden conjoining of differing advantages which will turn the tables on the darkness. - to be able to see clearly those lineaments of reality on which darkness chiefly squats (because darkness is so much in the mix), to be able to see with elasticity and perspicuously through walls and round corners and into heads and through times and places has only to touch and hold, touch and hold, with our dense sense of what sensation is like that has no vacuum of nothingness about it - then the powers together of the one and the other may outmanoeuvre death and darkness.

LVII

the moral and psychological persuasion i have tried to engage in in this book, that one should not allow the death and darkness of fear into one’s thought and action, has been not for some moral end, but so that the death which the spiritual world has suffered corporally (and which we do not experience corporally for so long as, as we say, we are alive) should not be incorporated into our dense existence in some non-corporal form - we must, on the contrary, be as alive in our inner attitudes as we are inevitably (though temporarily) alive in our bodies; just as in the spiritual world those who have the light of life fully in their minds pitch their energies against any accepting of the corporal death in their mixture, and try to be as alive in their bodies as they are in their minds.

the obverse of this is truly ghastly - that one should freely allow (in the dense world) the death in one’s mind to advance upon the life in one’s body; or (in the spiritual world, as some do) should allow the death inevitably present in one’s body to advance into one’s mind -

LVIII

in the dense world (which is where the uniting of forces against the darkness must finally take place) we can even now, if temporarily (because corporal death can only be kept temporarily at bay), have at moments the almost complete experience of being both mentally and corporally alive (although the boundaries of our vision of the universe are limited by the dark) - whereas in the spiritual world the experience of being corporally alive must be a hard-won imaginative ‘figment’ that requires immense mental life to keep going, even though that mental life sees beyond boundaries that hem us in.

they need us; we need them - we need to credit their boundlessness; they need to credit our corporal life.

LIX

a sad though common sight for a spirit full of light to see a human being in our part of creation with a mind deeply damaged by annihilating darkness, either suffered uncomprehendingly or (worse) rejoiced in - and to see that darkness in the mind seep into and attack the physical life which is so vital a thing that the spirit is deeply dependent on it to ‘figment’ a physical life for himself.

the vivid centre of the physical life is sexual energy and it is this the darkness chiefly makes for, so the enlightened spirit will see with huge disappointment that sexual energy made jagged and fragmentary or quiescent or ferocious as it succumbs to the dark - worst of all with boys because it is here that sexual energies are able to be at their most carelessly intense -

LX

religions, being generally among the most skilled and accomplished creations of a darkness intent on using as much light as possible in order to disguise its purposes, often give the uncannily accurate sense of being sensitively focussed in geometrically precisely the reverse of the direction the victory of light would require.

so for example with the common religious subordination of the physical to the spiritual - a spirit full of light must be torn somewhat between amusement and despair to see the corporal preacher disparage the greatest gift of energy he has to offer in the struggle against the dark - to see the corporal preacher recommend the very absences of physical desire the enlightened spirit has to struggle so hard to supply for himself, to fuck, to eat, to sleep, to shit -

the skilled darkness uses light to weave the net of deceit, for the preacher will in the act of disparagement or indeed as the reason for it, set his face against greed and physical violence, pain (sometimes) and sickness, death and decay.

LXI

even though it may seem strenuous and odd for a few chapters to think as i have been thinking, there is really no need to do any more in the cause of light than trust our most basic responses, for even the most eloquent preacher of the supremacy of the spirit will look forward to his tea after the sermon -

we must hope, i think (no: expect) that the time will come when the channels are so far open between the divided parts of the universe that physicality can seep back into the world of spirits, so that their elasticity in time and place becomes a physical reality - then also we can look forward to the disappearance of any competition for or between times and places; the disappearance of any territorial instinct of a geographical or temporal kind, because there will be space enough for all possibilities -

to tie down the terrific energies of physical reality to compete for singularities of place and time, to remove its intended elasticity, must have ensured most of the operation of darkness in our world, where there is always competitive struggle between many for what only one can have, a struggle that has seemed so basic to a sense of value as to reduce to a mere device for children the notion that everyone has a prize -

but if the channels are opened again, everyone has a prize; and there is room in the spaciousness of created reality for the accomplishment of all its desires.

LXII

since there is nothing in the world of spirits that has not at some point been physical, since that world of spirits (whether of human beings or all other things besides that live in the light) is waiting for its entrance again into physical reality, not by the interim method of singular physical reincarnation but by the final elastic method of total physical restoration, like blood to a cramped limb again, then when the restoration comes it will be upon our own ground, not like some ethereal last trump in a theological heaven, but like this chair against which i’m leaning - the thing familiar, solid, though excitingly full of possibilities unexpected before, of renovation, of multiplicity -

once one is assured of its basic familiarity, one can be content perhaps not to speculate much more upon the nature of things when darkness has gone; rather as once one knows one’s lover and is on terms of reality with him, the exciting and unforeseen possibilities of love can simply be allowed to arise - the real thing is to be at ease in the solid normality of love -

and so too perhaps in the solid normality of a reality without darkness - which will be a world principally without fear. i begin to realise that what i have been doing in this little book is to habituate myself in every turn of my consciousness to the absence of fear, to the absence of that nothingness, that yawning emptiness in the pit of the stomach - to habituate myself to a world more amiably compacted in its physical delight once the spaces made by fear have been revealed as the spaces they are and filled in -

as things are for now we are used to isolated moments of delight, used to surviving or negotiating across the space to the next isolated moment - and we are used to deriving some murky fear-laden falsity of wisdom from the notion it won’t last, or someone might take it, or you’ll have to pay for it. by contrast, i protest, one should live without such false wisdom; live so you can have love and see another have it, without the isolating poison of jealously guarding your own preserve against time or a rival; live as though the elastic simultaneity were already there present in our physical midst -

LXIII

in the little book of blank pages i’m filling up with this writing i’ve written first on all the rectos and then turned it and written back again on the versos - so that as i reach the last few blank sides i’m writing on the back of the first things i said -

which is, i hope, not only an image for the coherence of what i’ve said but an assurance of it - on the back of the page i’m now writing on i am contesting the belief that no order is achievable without fear - in the pages that have followed i have opposed that belief and its consequences in every way i could conceive, and have explored the topography of a reality without fear in all the ways i could imagine -

what i propose, i think, is more irrevocable, more irreversible, than a belief; its effect upon one is closer to the effect of a powerful drug than of a body of propositions, and the drug works hand in glove with the basic predisposition against being frightened that is in all of us -

the first question one should try to ask, very quietly and with absolutely genuine concern to know the answer, so that this is no kind of semi-hostile ploy, of another human being who is trying to frighten you, is why; and then if the second question can be asked without any shadow of aggressive manoeuvre (or when it can): what are you frightened of yourself? these are the fundamental questions, no others, and if they cannot be answered then no other answers are of consequence.

it is difficult to ask them, however, without causing fear, because the willingness to frighten and to be afraid are clutched so close to the psychological centre that such questions may seem to be groping for the essential privacies that make one person’s life his own and not another’s - it is as though darkness has particularly homed in upon, has engaged particularly closely with, our basic predisposition against being frightened, so that sometimes the finest probe cannot split apart the join between what is natural to us and what is not -

it is not, i think, that we are not aware of the distinction within us between what is natural to us and what not, with a perfectly sure and confident instinct; the problem is to make of that perceived distinction a workable disjunction in the ordinary circumstances of every day, so that we are not frightened all the more because we don’t want to be, fearful of what we dislike so much.

LXIV

and now a most beautiful late autumn morning in the middle of wales, with the sun pouring over the ridge of the hills to the south and east - and a sense gathering in me, because of that and because there is little left now to write of this book, that one should turn from difficulties and complications to ease and simplicity - i spent a small part of yesterday looking up some things on the internet, with the overwhelming sense, as i waited for the machine to creak through its work, not of the amazing facility of communication there is now, but of how extraordinarily cumbered it all is - the clutter of rules and scaffolding through which one makes one’s way to whatever has most recently been written about browning, threatened at every step by expulsion from the game if you put a foot wrong, reminds one very much of the extreme complication of creed, desire, culture, affinity, law, custom, regulation browning’s own characters find themselves in in the great monologues -

but what draws one to browning is his sense that beyond a certain point complications crumble into whatever still greater chaos lies before them as they lose hold, and that out of this emerges unscathed at last the human spirit, of the dying bishop remembering his mistress, for example, in his last words: “so fair she was!” -

“so fair she was!” - and the ‘was’ of the dying man is drawing irresistibly close to the present tense as she is in his mind and desire - near to death he turns so powerfully towards the simplicity of life: “so fair she was!” - out of the tangle of intrigue, politics, jealousies, fears, persuadings, out of the chaotic system in which he has lived: “so fair she was!” -

and let no one say he merely idealises the past and the beauty of his girl, that things weren’t really altogether like that - as though what is real is the grey tumble of half worn or half worn out things for us to shuffle or fling ourselves about in - because such moments come clarified from the past into the present to join the autumn sun this morning and they fit us, they are our proper dress of experience.

LXV

the great tyrannies hold down the human spirit not so radically by the apparatus of law and convention as by offering a fundamental account of reality to be believed - to escape so deep-rooted, so apparently real a hold, it may be one has to come to seem almost insane, even to oneself, as one ceases to be persuaded of what any child in the system could tell you was plain even if regrettable fact -

it will need, in such circumstances, all the resources of the human imagination to replace the reality by which one is surrounded by an alternative reality, which may seem only to be held in place by the unsupported energy of one’s desire that it should be so. if that energy cannot in the end find support from outside and yet nevertheless persists it may come to seem as imprisoning a fantasy as the original tyranny.

but i think we should not suppose on occasion too quickly that no outside help will come - one sees in the accounts of opposition to insufferable creeds the whole range of outcome, from the collapse into fantasy or compliance to the sudden astounding response from outside the tyranny that reality need not be so - and the response may be very long in coming.

the tyranny of darkness and its energy fear is the most established of all, its account of reality seems the most unshakably real - it may be tomorrow that help will come from the outside to those who imagine it need not be so, or it may be the longest of times we must wait - but however long the wait, let us not be forced back into compliance with fear, nor into deep dreams of a time when darkness ceases; but rather look steadily for the outside evidence that darkness and fear is the lunacy, ground ourselves always on the evidence that light and delight are normal, expect with no hectic cries but with a steady stubborn certainty the time when we shall be, in common with all created things and the high god himself, fully physical, free of the singularities of time and place, undying unfrightening and unafraid.