John Powys - The Brazen Head

Sir Mort was a tall and slender, but a broad-shouldered man, of about sixty, whose most striking physical characteristic was the shape of his skull, which was very long and very narrow and was perched like the skull of a vulture on the top of a long neck. The length and narrowness of Sir Mort’s head was emphasized by his deep hollow eye-sockets, out of which his eyes, dark-green in colour, glared forth with a very peculiar effect; for it was as if they had no connection with each other at all, but were, each of them, the solitary eye of a saurian creature whose eye was at the top of its scaly head.

He had obviously snatched at the warmest and smallest jerkin to hand as he went out and at the smallest and lightest iron headpiece, which was scarcely more indeed than a band of metal round his head, a band into which had been fastened a black-and-white feather.

As he approached his Manor-Fortress he soon recognized that both its material and psychic atmosphere were wholly different from what they had been when he set out an hour ago. There was now an intermittent hum of human voices, steps, cries, exclamations, agitations, conversations; and the cold east wind that was blowing across the forest, and rustling through the spruces and the still bare larches and pines, carried upon its breath and whirled up and down, and back and forth, and round and round, what might have been an invisible emanation from that startling and surprising conglomeration of human voices, human bodies, human gestures, human cries, along with sounds of all sorts rising from weapons of iron and brass and bronze and silver and gold.

“Is our land invaded from France?” was the first thought that rushed through that vulturine skull. But the next was a more rational one. “Fool that I am!” he muttered. “It’s that thrice-damnable son of a bitch they’ve made into a Saint who must be upon us with all his bloody followers! Poor darling care-driven Valentia! How agitated you must be! I pray John is still in the place and Tilton in not too architectural a mood! And I hope to the devil that our lusty old Jew Peleg has brought Lil-Umbra safe back! They can’t, surely, all this huge crowd, expect us to feed them?”

Instead of quickening his pace, as he made his way towards the postern door, the Lord of the Manor of Roque began to walk with unusual slowness, pressing the long handle of his spear heavily against the ground at each step.

“I’ve got to face the fact,” he told himself, “that whether I like it or don’t like it, and whether poor dear Valentia likes it or doesn’t like it, all this whole blasted crew will have to be fed this morning. I hope to God there’s enough in our kitchen to fill their damned bellies!”

The tall lean Master of Roque who, as the sole survivor, save for his own offspring, of the incorrigibly eccentric family of Abyssum, ceased now to take even the slowest steps towards his destination. In the downright language he would have used himself, he stopped dead. “My birthday come round again!” he thought, “and poor little Valentia, with all her values and valuations, will be fifty next August! Twenty years more, according to Holy Scripture, and we shall be an aged pair, and the place swarming with grandchildren! Well, well, well.”

He turned the glittering point of his spear earthward, and using both his powerful forearms, he forced it down so deeply into the earth that he soon was able to lean with the full weight of the pit of his stomach upon the large bronze knob that terminated the handle.

In this position, leaning on the handle of the spear that belonged to him and pressing its point into the ground that belonged to him, Sir Mort couldn’t resist indulging in a queer mental performance that he prayed to God he had been crafty enough to keep entirely to himself — namely an almost ritualistic trick of his, which from the days of his extremely weird childhood he had been led by the deepest thing in him to practise.

The deepest thing in Sir Mort was without doubt the intense egoism of his own soul, in other words his absolutely abnormal self-centredness. None of his offspring approached him in his awareness of his interior self or ego, or in his power of isolating it and of enjoying its isolation. Sir Mort imaged this soul of his in a curiously original and indeed a very erratic way. He saw it in the shape of a particular kind of spear, the kind whose spear-head grows wider and wider for several inches, then proceeds to narrow itself for the same number of inches before it reaches its sharp and piercing spear-point.

He saw it however as made, not of iron or bronze, but of flint. He saw it indeed as a spear with a flint arrow-head for its point, a point enlarged to about a dozen times the size of an ordinary arrow-head. This spiritual spear with a super arrow-head became to Sir Mort the ultimate hieroglyph of himself; and in all his private and secret thoughts, which were often extremely fantastic, he actually saw himself as this same flint-headed spear.

He had got into the habit of imagining his inmost self in the shape of this spear with its flint super arrow-head driving its way through the mossy surface of the earth, while he forced himself to think of it as possessed of every one of his five senses.

Unknown to another soul — for Lady Val was the last person in the world to draw out of him such a secret — Sir Mort, who would have been regarded by his wife and by his sons and by all his neighbours, especially by his pious friend, Prior Bog of Bumset, as simply insane, had they known of these practices, imagined himself seeing the roots and the earth-worms and the cracks in the stones and the variously coloured veins of the different geological strata upon which his soul impinged as it descended deeper and deeper into the hole it was making!

He also forced himself to touch, to smell, and to taste, all these animal, vegetable and mineral entities into whose dwelling he was descending; and finally, so that his spiritual pilgrimage should miss nothing, he imagined himself listening, as he headed downwards, to the intercourse, in some sort of earth-mould language, which these roots and cracks and crevices, these worms in their subterranean dwellings indulged in among themselves, so that he could compare their mental reactions to life with his own.

But this was only the first “move”, so to speak, in Sir Mort’s intercourse with the cosmic multiplicity. The next thing this crazy owner of Roque must needs do was to pull himself out of the hole into which he had descended with such persistence and proceed to shoot himself through the air! On this airborne quest he was careful to avoid every conceivable collision. He avoided the Moon and he avoided every planet. He avoided all the falling stars.

And then, when he had got clear of all impediments in his aerial flight, he set himself to enjoy the pure touch of nothingness, the ineffable taste of nothingness, the indescribable smell of nothingness, the god-like sight of the immeasurable recesses of nothingness, and finally, pervading his pilgrim-soul with the most exquisite pleasure of all, the unutterable symphonies of the music of nothingness.

And then he would force his spear-head soul to make a great dive out of the depths of the air into the depths of the sea, and it can well be believed how the touch, smell, taste, sight and sound of the swirling, the water-spouting, the whirlpooling, the towering and lowering, the roaring and soaring, the rumbling and grumbling, of the everlasting ocean, with both its eternal motion and its eternal identity, would satisfy to the full the insane void of his unending quest: and, finally and at last, into the hot fire of the Sun and the cold fire of the Moon; and from these into the incredible fires of all the living stars, until, out of earth, out of water, out of air, and out of fire, he wrested what his spear-head of a soul required for its imperishable nourishment. For the only thing in the world that Sir Mort feared was death — the thought of being non-est , of being as if he had never been.