Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Upstairs, in the long room overlooking the Adriatic, where the tide blows up clean from Africa, you are lying. Your face is as clear as water. Softly posed in the moonlight like a forgotten desert you are lying, living and dying, lulled, systolic, diastolic motion, as the waves shiver their enormous spasms on the beach. What is poignant is this hour, this late waning moonlight, the Pleiades wheeling over your dramatic Sapphic, the enormous clouds, the surf, the monk shivering in his cell among the candles, the dolphins turning, and the face, the white face turned up blind to Africa like a pilgrim blind with dream. Nothing else. In this dead night under a dead Greek myth I tell you finally that it is not death. It is life in her wholeness from which one draws this terrible system of love, of creation, of loss. In Cyprus under the trees, Athens, Sicily, the same long purifying tides throw up their pure lotion across the statues, the robes, the eyes of the huddled philosophers who outfaced the truth. The churches are stiff with beards and candles, celebrating the dark mass of the spirit as it enters its absolute aloneness. In the cathedrals under the sea we tread the aisles of weeds, and listen for the long chime of bells, bubbled under the water for centuries, among the cargoes of grain and millet, raisins and fruit: argosies which are reckoned on no merchant’s sheets. Cross over to Bethlehem. They will be able to tell you for certain whether something has been born from this discord of the elements, or whether the fiat has gone forth; whether this is a pre-nativity or a post-mortem!

Out of that void in which the dream lies, coiled and fatal as the dragon, I conjure these few pieces of religion above a body lying silent as death, and as spacious. Hushed, in a new temperature, as if under glass the single dark candle of the torso ended in little blunt pebbles, toes. Or hair like a soft bed of breathing charcoal laid about the islands, twisting up its coils in soft explosions on the beaches. Outside on the beach the old women are sweeping up the seaweed in a heavy wind. Can you hear what is said in the screaming of the olives, in the dramatic archery of the cypresses? Verminous, the top-hatted monks huddle to mass in Athos, going through the familiar litanies, without comfort. What does it mean, this language, this voice raised to the roof like a thick stump of sound, these vulgar armed candles? In England there is an old man who feeds the swans, slowly burning down, damp, rheumy, sour, into the hollow socket of his breast. The poets hymn his simplicity. What does this mean? If he were an old bun-nosed Tibetan feeding the wild swans under the Greek Islands, they would deplore the incongruity of the world.

Then there is that other moment when I come into the room just as the dawn is breaking. You are alive. There is a lot to say, but the morning is so reverent, the smoke on the bonfire lies about in parcels, the ice on the pond like an altar cloth, morning … The first long hush, like a breath drawn taut before the swimmer dives into the icy river. There are huge warm places in the field-grass where the cattle lay. Dew heavy. The black jersey still lying out over your left shoulder like a sofa on a green field. Dew heavy. The deep scent of the castle standing charred on the hill. There is much to be said, but no possible way of saying it. I can hear the ivy crawling on the walls. The sun is shining on the spoon, the toast, on your tongue. The chickens are going to market, very chilly and disgruntled. Someone is cutting wood for the fires. I am as nerveless as the morning sausages on the board. The knife slits, the sun strides up over the hill and we are able to talk again, slowly and without emphasis. Italy is mentioned. There are four gutted candles in the room. Yes, and the first edition of Baudelaire. Your voice starts queer responses in one: a bone in the groin, mastoid, the nerves of the throat, the fibres of the tibia. I cannot tell for certain, but I am bound to get a letter within a day of two. Let us walk quietly in the declension of the season, smoke a pipe over the gate, take note of how the asphodels are doing. In the little house run over the accounts, select a book, doze over the fire, or at bedtime light the candles and start the piano hymning. It is all the same, for this is a piece out of another book. It is significant merely because Tarquin is mentioned. Over the fire and the crusader’s hearth, in the smoke of pipes, Tarquin is mentioned. It is a strange immortality to be consummated here, in this cottage, drowned in flowers, under the glimmering bottoms of the books. I record it now merely to reassure myself that we are never forgotten. There is always the strange consummation of memory taking place, over the whole world, the whole of time even, until the vocabularies in which you are created fall away and are renewed.

Between that submarine cottage and this fanatic Adriatic landscape, where the tides beat up carrying us away in the impetus of their struggle towards history, there is a gulf fixed. More vast, more unexplored than the Challenger Deep. In that gulf, dancing, as in a coloured shadow-show, are the figures I keep talking about. Their shadows lie across the paper. Yachts cross, and rolling caiques; occasionally a grey warship slides across the windows, but the shadows are constant. The dolphins idle all day in clumsy regiments, mixing into the picture, crowding it. Embassies from Minos and the litmus Cretan women, but we do not forget, we do not forget, we do not forget. In spite of the immense sea, steering up and down, attacking, feinting, wheeling its range of colours under the house which stands like a white ark on the black rock. Within the thirtieth parallels North and South of the Equator like a huge humming-bird ultramarine to the South of lat. 30. S. a deep swollen indigo. Under the terrible fires of the Antarctic Circle, a glib and fearful olive-green; always the old nurse, the Poseidon, cherishing her dead like a bear, washing through the imploded strongrooms of liners, breaking open the trunks of sailors, with a maniac love, cherishing. This is the element to which we shall be delivered up at the final moment, lulled, kneaded, softened and gushed. Smooth round shot, footfirst, parcelled in linen, shrived. Then with a long cool drop to drift down, adamant, to the planktonic organisms dither and skate, sprouting exotic eyes on floating stalks; where the sperm whales munch dredgefuls of cuttlefish and prowl like bardic Tennysons, muttering in their beards.

Come, I am always saying to Tarquin. There are still new universes to be inhabited, if you have the authentic disease and the courage. Come, drop down with me to the limits of the photic zone. Let us construct out of the sensitive bodies of this twilight race our new systems that we talk about all day long. Bathypelagic, myopic, optical, shall we dawdle away the aeons over this one problem, making a little personal propaganda as we go? At a hundred fathoms fish like silver bullets. Under the viscous scalp itself phenomena like Porpita and Ianthina, blue smoke in water. At three hundred rufous, brick, claret. The violet flesh of pteropods, wicked wicked, wicked. Here is a philosophic reality whose terminology is lying there, complete but unused. Come, you white-livered tapeworm, let us get busy. The problem is how to destroy the fatal passivity of the plankton, and give it the nektonic virtues; the ability to move with the time, and against tide. I am not concerned with the Benthos, the mud eaters, shit gobblers, and their brood. We must concentrate only on those who have a chance of being saved. (Hilda, the great sonsy whale, for instance. I have seen her dragged out on the beach and hacked open from chin to navel. Her belly so crammed with crustaceans that they put spades to work on her.) Hilda, one realizes, has fulfilled the primary law in her way. She has a baroque nobility because her gift is total. She lives with her great swollen dugs pressed out against time, in a perpetual delirium of service. And now, in the winter of our discontent, she has given up all she had to the poor. Watch her. She is sitting there calmly drinking tea, with one shoe off. Her nostrils are cut like ancient anchor ports of a ship. One expects at any moment that a length of hawser will clatter out of them and — splash! — anchor her in her own teacup. Indifferently clare clips his frayed cuffs with her scissors. And Peters sits lugubriously on the bed and wishes he were dead. Peters? A nicely clothed dummy fresh from school. The kind of waxwork that has given the English their reputation abroad. He has read all that the well-dressed man should read. His poise is superb with members of his own class. One has the idea that he could pick his nose with a cigar in his mouth and still look genteel, old cottage English, pure, bred on the bottle, etc. In the drab vertigo of Sunday afternoon we perform our motionless almanac together. We share with painted things the loss of personality, sitting here in this exotic gas-lit hothouse, among the owls and cosmetics. Hilda I know is not with us, but already entering that third ocean which has been prepared for her. Crossing the zodiac of the new universe alone, pioneer, adventurer, forerunner: from house to house, her great turbines shaking her free of the muddy littorals. Nosing down with that predatory beak of hers deeper and deeper, across the fucoid belt, the laminarian, the zosteran belt toward the absyssal deep which is marked on no card. Yes, beyond the territory of those remote tribes we only live in illuminated names: the pycnogonida, the nudibranchia, the brittlestars, the chitons, the crinoids, and the pennatulids — away beyond these into that region from which we are going to receive the new myth.