Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

‘ I speak my own lines.’

‘You can do that because the Maestro gave you, animal that you are, no lines to speak.’

‘Don’t try to be clever, old sinner. I want to know if the great raven has never come to you, how you were able to tell me how to go back, back, back to the beginning of the dream that is called reality?’

‘These things are known even to those members of the sorcery community who have no importance, but we lack the virtue necessary to make use of the knowledge.’

‘Very well, I’ll release you now but if you have lied to me you won’t enjoy my next visit.’

The hermit shook himself feebly when I let him go. He wandered off with no word of farewell and I departed to seek a suitable dreaming place.

I flew over sea and land, still in the world of da Carpi’s painting, until I came to a sort of natural amphitheatre at the foot of a black escarpment which seemed to resound with echoes of silence under the arch of the sky.

‘This will be my dreaming place,’ I said. I landed in the centre of the amphitheatre and lay down to sleep. Day became night and I dreamed many things: ships and battles, knights on horseback, beautiful women, music and song. I awoke when the sun rose behind the escarpment and the second day began.

I remained where I was, fasting to clear my mind for the great raven. When night came I slept and I dreamed of sieges and towers, battles and blood, stormy seas and ships driven on to rocks where some people died by drowning, others by the sword, and the screaming of women was heard.

On the third day when night came I dreamed of blackness, only that. I dreamed of blackness every night after that, and on the eighth night the blackness swooped and became the great raven.

The great raven looked at me and blinked, showing me a clear bluish-white disc like a little round mirror in which I saw only blankness.

‘Where do you want to go?’ he said, and his voice rebounded in massed echoes from the black escarpment.

‘To the beginning of the dream that is called reality,’ I whispered.

‘ Why ?’ said the raven.

‘I want to go beyond time and space to rescue Angelica always.’

‘There are heroes for that. To me speak only truth.’

‘I want her for myself.’

I was looking into the raven’s left eye when I said that. Then the mirror flashed and I was in the eye looking out. Around me the vast blackness of the bird opened and lifted and the earth fell away below us, all the flimsy contrivances of humankind and the clamour of its voices blurring into dimness and distance as we rose above the grey sky and into the brilliant clarity of the blue dome in which the present curved endlessly upon itself to compass past and future.

Up we flew, high, high into the blue dome, then whistling down in a dizzying black-winged rush we shot the long, long curve past faces huge and tiny on the flickering screen of memory, faces in the shadows, in the light, lips shaping words remembered and forgotten in the moving gleams of time, the wavering of candlelight, the pattering of ghostly feet, the boom of tower clocks, the fading ink of letters tied with faded ribbons; faces wheeling with horsemen and battles and cannon, marching with armies, screaming in burning cities, drowning in shipwrecks and the thunder of the wild black ocean; palimpsested voices, distant figures and the changing colours of processions, plagues, migrations, ruins, standing stones, cave drawings, jungles, deserts, dust, volcanoes, floods, ages shuffling into silence.

Down, down we arrowed blackly through the silence to a dim and smoking red that seethed and crackled and bubbled and was veined with golden rivulets of lava. Down, down through that red to a dimmer red, a deeper silence, an older stillness. We were in a cavern dimly lit by the red and flickering light of our mind, the raven’s and mine.

Here, we said.

What?

Here, here, here. Our voice had become many voices, voices without number, tiny and great. The raven was no longer a raven, raven, raven, raven. Nor was I what I had been; we were without form, we were not yet alive: tiny, tiny dancing giants looming greatly in uncertain shapes and dwindling in the shadows; fast asleep and dancing in the dim red caverns of sleep.

Through age-long dimnesses of red we danced and sang incessantly the long song of our sorting: yes and no, we sang in silence, grouping and dispersing and regrouping in the circles and the spirals of the sleep-dance. Through aeons we danced while the mountains cooled under the long rains and the deeps filled up with oceans. We danced through all the colours of the years while, unseen and unknown by us, the world danced with us into the dream of reality.

The dancing continued in my mind but the raven was gone. I awoke in the centre of the amphitheatre and I knew that I could now go through time and space and assume whatever form was necessary.

My aeons-long sojourn with the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep had made me realise how provincial my outlook had been before. How little the works of man and the hopes of man mattered and how little our dream of reality itself mattered! Still, that’s all there is and we must make the best of it.

The place in which I awoke was not far from Ebuda, the Isle of Tears. Leaving my corporeality in the world of da Carpi’s painting I took my leave of the amphitheatre and the black escarpment and as the naked idea of me without visible form I took to the air. No sooner had I done so than I felt a pull, as though a line connecting the centre of me to the centre of something else had grown taut. Land and sea unrolled beneath me as naked, bodiless, invisible, I was flying, flying, the cool air streaming past me until there appeared below me a noble city that I recognised at once: Rome!

When I saw the eternal city on her seven hills beneath me all gilded in the afternoon sunlight a thrill ran through me. It was springtime, the sky was blue, the world seemed beautiful. The Colosseum appeared, and from it rose the ghostly roar of the crowd as gladiators killed each other for their entertainment. This is how Nero and his Romans used their little mortal span, their little dream of reality. SPQR, SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS , said the standards borne by the legions. Certainly they represented the senate but what about the populace? Rome civilised the world but its roads were perhaps straighter than its politicians. From high up one looks down on what those below look up to.

I was being drawn towards the Baths of Caracalla. There seemed no danger in it as I descended to a quiet street near the ruins of the Baths. With no transition I found myself in a human mind. This was my first experience of this sort in the world of the present and ‘Wow!’ said who? ‘You’re here!’ I or someone else said in white letters advancing across a blackness. It came to me that I was in the mind of someone who called himself Guglielmo Stranieri. Although I was taking in the world through his senses I found it necessary to make constant adjustments: my eyes were side by side on the front of my head so that I had to give conscious thought to the act of seeing; as an animal I had viewed things mostly from a distance; now I had to refocus; my human senses of smell and hearing lacked the sharpness I was used to, so that I was always straining to smell and hear more. The air in the room where I sat was smoky and stale, with an underscent of garlic and sweat; beyond the room I heard engines, footsteps, voices. I was/we were looking at a small free-standing illuminated window. There was no wall around it. It was on a desk beyond which were bookshelves and a wall. On this illuminated window were white letters on a black background. They formed the words you are reading now; this is how I first saw my name spelled out. There was a feeling in me as of the sap rising in a tree. ‘I am part of the present world,’ I said. ‘I am no longer confined in a book,’ and saw my words appear in this window that is called a screen.