Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

The Jewish legionaries scourge this Italian Jesus and they nail him to a cross on the Capitoline Hill. After his death I mingle with the crowd, I listen to what they are saying.

‘Lousy Christ-killers!’ says the man next to me.

‘Who?’ I say.

‘Who?’ says the man. ‘Those murdering Jews! Who else?’

‘I thought perhaps you meant the Romans who told the Jews to do it,’ I say.

‘Never mind that,’ he says. ‘Who’s governing Rome? Who put Jesus on the cross, eh? Who drove in the nails? It was those lousy Christ-killers, it was those murdering Jews.’

I turn to others in the crowd. ‘Those lousy Jews!’ is what they all say. ‘Those Christ-killers!’

Here I leave the Italian Jesus; I don’t know whether or not he rose up and made further appearances.

Night, night, night. Perhaps the only realities are night and departure. Everything else is illusion. Staying anywhere in the light of day is illusion. If there were no Jews they would have to be invented.

Yes, I am a child of the night, a child of departures. The barking of dogs is my signpost, the voices of owls mark my road into the darkness. Inside my head I have stopped talking, I am quiet. I give myself to the old, old night that waits within me, the old, old night in the old, old wood. In this night the charcoal-burners crouch listening by their hearths while the trees pray, the wind speaks, the leaves rustle like souls departing with the upward-flying sparks. Quiet, quiet, the mist is rising from the river, the bats are writing the names of darkness, the owl is teaching the mice: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’

I listen for my Bath Kol but I hear only the thumping of my heart and the sound of my footfalls. Why am I on this road through the dark wood? I am afraid. What have I to sustain me? Jesus has appeared to me but what have I to do with Jesus? I think of the tax-collector, perhaps he too has passed through this wood wondering what would sustain him. ‘Thou Jew!’ whispers the Bath Kol suddenly, whispers the Bath Kol in my ear in the dark wood. ‘My Jew!’ whispers the Bath Kol.

In fear I go forward. The quietness of the Bath Kol draws itself together in the dark, becomes a point of silence from which a hugeness grows. In the hugeness I perceive this wood, this rising ground to be the Mount of Venus between the opened thighs of the mother-space that is time. The wood is clamorous with the silence of birds and demons and great wordless mouths full of sharp teeth. When I close my eyes I see the colour of the dark: it is a strong purple-blue, very luminous and vibrating like a crystal. In those crystalline vibrations I seem to see a pale green phosphorescence in the shape of a man hanging head downward by one leg. He is hung by one ankle, his other leg is bent, the bent leg crossing the straight to make an upside-down figure four. His arms are bent to make a triangle on each side, his hands are behind him. He fades with the purple-blue and I hear the low voice of a bell that nods to the walking of an animal. ‘Thou also,’ says the rough and broken voice of the bell, so I know it to be the bell hung from the neck of Death’s pale horse. I see Death on his horse, all luminous bones that look as if they would clatter but they move in perfect silence. Death beckons and I follow through the dark wood in which he moves like a lantern.

There is a stench of rotting flesh. I am standing in front of a tree; it is an oak tree. In the crystalline vibrations of the purple-blue I see the shapes of oak leaves trembling and I see the man hanging by one leg. He is naked. He has no head, his head has been cut off. Much of the flesh has been eaten off the bones by animals; what remains of the corpse is bloated and writhing with maggots. The swollen male member sticks out stiffly, uncircumcised and tumescent with rot. Death says to me in a low voice, ‘This is that man who saved your life when they cut off your manhood.’

I begin to cry with great wracking sobs that shake my whole body. In this stinking maggoty corpse I see a light like a candle in a tabernacle, within the stench I smell a sweetness. Inside the corpse I see Jesus Christ crucified, broken and twisted on his cross that is right-side up in the upside-down body. ‘No, no!’ I cry, ‘It mustn’t be like that! Stop it, thou Jew, stop being crucified! Come down off that cross!’ I claw at the rotting corpse, trying to pull the crucified Jesus out of the dead flesh so that I can get him off his cross. Jesus smiles and begins to fade. O God! what will there be now? Only the black spin of the universe, only eternal motion without face or voice when Jesus is gone. ‘Jesus!’ I cry, ‘Don’t go away!’

‘Hurry!’ whispers the Bath Kol, ‘Hurry to Jerusalem!’

Hearing that urgent whisper I become terribly, terribly afraid that I shall not be able to get to Jerusalem quickly enough, that no one will get to Jerusalem quickly enough to keep Christ from going away. How do I yearn for the haunting dread and joy of his voice in the echoing dark of the world inside me, the comfort and terror of his presence. How do I long for him the virtuality without limit, him the quickener, him the mystery. Remembering no prayer I howl in my fear and I begin to kick the maggoty corpse. ‘Jesus!’ I cry, ‘Come thou out of there! Thou Jew! Be with me!’ But there is only darkness and rottenness in the corpse, the light that was within it has gone and the sweetness. The corpse is too high for me to kick properly; kicking it I fall down. Lying there in the wet grass under the corpse I feel maggots under my fingers and among them a gold ring, I feel the goldenness of it in the darkness, it must have fallen from the headless man’s gullet when I kicked him.

It is of course the tax-collector’s wedding ring, the circlet of gold that proclaims his union with Sophia. There has been a day in the life of this headless carcass when it knelt beside that splendid woman, exchanged vows with her, put a ring on her finger, received this ring on its own finger that is now bloated and glistening. I feel in this dead man’s headless memory the touch of her hand, the scent of her breath, the softness of her mouth in the marriage kiss. In the memory of this rotting stump of flesh I hear the rustling of silk that slides away to reveal the dazzle of her naked flesh, the imperious and delicate scroll of her law. This golden circlet has dropped with the maggots out of the dead gullet because the pilgrim tax-collector before his death has swallowed his wedding ring, has renewed his covenant with his wife before being murdered and robbed. What am I to do with this ring from the finger of this maggot feast that was the lawful husband of my wife of one night?

Here I must speak of a particular phenomenon and to do so I must refer again to Hieronymus Bosch, that marvel among painters who never fails to notice the butterfly in Samson’s field of vision. Bosch is above all the master of what is seen out of the corner of the mind, the essential reality behind the agreed-on appearance of things. Sometimes I manifest myself as an owl painted by Bosch and in this way I fly through the skies of his paintings and observe what is happening. My owl-by-Bosch manifestation is not a superficial one, it follows virtual lines back to his pencil and charcoal sketches and forward from underpainting to varnishing.

A very good example of the accuracy of Bosch’s observation of the real behind the apparent is the upper left-hand side of the central panel of the Temptation of Saint Anthony’ triptych. It is not necessary to have seen this painting to recognize immediately what I am about to describe; I refer to it only as a convenient example.

The upper right-hand side of the central panel shows a daytime sky; extraordinary things are to be seen in it but none the less it is an ordinary daytime sky; the left-hand side of the central panel shows the night that is always waiting within the day and the fire that is always waiting within the night. It is in this night within the day, this fire within the night, that what I am going to talk about is to be seen. Bosch gives us burning farms and churches, falling steeples and gibbets, winged creatures (one of them with a ladder) flying through the air, companies of horsemen, sundry peasants and animals, and a woman washing clothes in the river by the light of the burning. One sees at once that this fire has not spread gradually from a small beginning; no, it has from its waiting state exploded into being, has burst the skin of night and time that could no longer contain it. On the right-hand edge of this night with the fire in it, in the space between the night on the left and the day on the right, the illumination is like that of a twentieth-century sports stadium in which a night game is being played; only there does one see light of such preternatural brilliance as that through which the creature (is it an angel or a devil?) with the ladder flies. Bosch could have seen such light and shadow only in a flash of lightning. But the light in this picture, this light between the night on the left and the day on the right, is not the flash that is gone in a fraction of a moment, it is lightning sustained and steady. This shows Bosch’s virtuality as well as his virtuosity; I have flown beside that creature with the ladder (always uncertain as to its allegiance; it has a tail but I cannot be sure it’s a devil) and I can testify that Bosch experienced that sky by quantum-jumping to the strange brilliance of total Now.